For some reason, Ileosa is in some kind of location. There's a voice, coming from somewhere.
"Welcome to the quiz show! Broadcasting to an audience of people you'll probably never meet, we're starting today with 'All About You! What's Your Moral Alignment?' with questions by Tasha Moore. Let us know when you're ready for the first question."
Ileosa appears to be having a dream. This happens every night, so it's really nothing out of the ordinary for her.
She isn't sure who Tasha Moore is. It's possible that her brain supplied the name and that she'll remember who this is when she wakes up, but also possible that the name is nonsense she came up with, or that it was dropped into her mind from somewhere else. That's the sort of thing that happens sometimes, when you send your consciousness drifting through the dimension of dreams.
She's more lucid than she usually is, in dreams, but not so lucid that she's going to question the premise.
"I'm ready for the first question."
"Great!"
"An ally at your job just informed you that upper management has been reviewing your work performance behind your back. What do you do?
A. I'd hope so! It's the job of upper management to do that type of thing.
B. I find a way to trip up the 'ally,' get them written up to take the heat off of me.
C. Tell this 'ally' the same thing to incite them to dig deeper so I don't have to. I expect daily updates.
D. Nothing. Who cares?"
Ileosa is being asked to imagine herself in a scenario where there's a powerful faction that's putting together a case against her, to destroy her, because they dislike her.
"Out of those four options, I'm inclined towards B or C, but the scenario seems underspecified in several respects."
"I'm not the original author of these questions, but I'm more familiar with her background, so I'd be happy to speculate about any particular points of confusion."
That makes as much sense as anything else in a dream.
"How fond am I of my ally? How many allies do I have? How afraid am I of the superintendent's faction? Can I go over their heads? Do I have a way to move against them without burning my ally? Am I to assume that I have considered every possible recourse, and concluded that these four options were my four best options?"
"Let's say you're mildly fond of them. You find them decent company, and if they fell ill or such you might write them a card about it. You have several such allies, but not more than a dozen. Your main concern about the superintendent's faction is that they might fire you from your position, meaning you'd have to apply to a different company for work, which could take time. It's possible you could go over their heads, but unless you had a highly serious issue to raise it would likely come off as annoying, and being sufficiently annoying might lead to you being fired, though one such instance like this probably wouldn't if you were otherwise doing good work. You don't know if acting like you're aware of the inspection will cause problems for your ally. It probably depends on how good you are at being subtle."
"And you are not to conclude that these were your best options. These options were intended by Tasha to reflect a range of possibilities, so you should pick the option that seems most similar to what you'd do. You're free to comment on the inadequacies of them."
Ileosa is not jumping to conclusions.
"Why, in this scenario, do I need work?"
"You don't have enough inherited wealth to live a comfortable lifestyle without working. You could probably spend some time between jobs spending from savings and maybe applying for various government programs, but in the long term you'd need another one."
Ileosa isn't happy with this scenario at all.
Ileosa might get fired, and need to apply to a job for work just so she can live comfortably.
Ileosa is a pleb.
(A pleb without marriage prospects. Possibly she's already married, in the scenario, to a useless man with low wages and few servants? Or perhaps in the scenario she was disfigured by pox.)
And, as if her life wasn't bad enough, Ileosa's non-pleb superintendent hates her enough to be building a case to oust her.
Ileosa finds herself filled with seething hatred for the superintendent and his faction.
She needs to keep her head, if she's to continue earning bread. But she's not going to forget who her enemies are. It may take her a thousand years, but she will have her revenge on the upper management.
"I think option C is nearest to what I'd do."
"Okay. Moving on:"
"An emergency requires that your friend drive cross-country and there's no one else to help them drive. Do you help out?
A. Yeah, but only if I don't have anything important going on.
B. I'd drive the first leg then "get sick" and have my "friend" take us on through.
C. Yes, and we're stopping whenever I get the itch to see some sights along the way.
D. No problem. I just have to make sure that my boss is OK with it first."
"I'll give some context preemptively – in this scenario, your friend has a horseless carriage. You probably do, too, and you know how to drive one, but you and your friend would be driving theirs. If you spent 8 hours a day driving it, you'd probably get across the country in less than a week. Driving it doesn't involve a lot of physical exertion, and it's intended to be comfortable regardless of weather, but you have to pay close attention to the road and other drivers."
D. No problem. I just have to make sure that my boss is OK with it first."
She had hoped that, in the next scenario, things would be different.
"If I sold my horseless carriage, how long could I live comfortably off the proceeds?"
"That's a tricky question. How much do you want to know? I hadn't gotten to the point of imagining you owning one particular model of carriage or how far you'd driven it."
"It's important to whether I can rule out option D. Insofar as possible, I would prefer a life of freedom, without as little begging for permission as possible, over a life of servitude. Total freedom might be unattainable from my starting position, but if selling the horseless carriage is sufficient for me to at least retire from daily scheduled labor, and to afford the servants and sustenance necessary for a minimally comfortable life, for the space of a natural human lifespan, I would like to do that. It isn't important to me, to have a horseless carriage, compared to that."
"Uh, for context, we're assuming you have various mechanisms to launder your clothes, alert you when someone wishes to speak to you, keep your home at the desired temperature, light your rooms, heat water for you, and so on, but you don't have any full-time servants. You might hire someone to clean your home on a monthly basis, or such. Your home is cleaner because your heating devices don't produce soot. Selling your used carriage is not going to provide you with that sort of lifestyle in the location you currently live indefinitely."
"It's possible that what you'd actually be doing in this context is working in some industry where you set your own hours but accordingly need to search for clients and manage other overhead yourself, due to a strong desire for independence. In that case, you could call option D inapplicable and effectively replace it with option A."
That is useful context!
Ileosa owns a wide variety of magic items, but still needs to work? And she can't sell her magic items and hire people, which means the magic items are cheaper than people, which means that the hypothetical scenario takes place in Azlant.
"I might want to go into business for myself, depending on various specifics."
Ileosa can see an argument for all four of the options, here. Certainly, if she had something important enough "going on," she'd have to decline, so that's an argument for option A. But if she gets sick midway of minding the road, it'd be downright unsafe for her to continue steering the carriage, so that's an argument for option B. (And, she might go in knowing that she's foreseeably going to get sick of watching the road, to get reduced credit with her friend instead of no credit. That sounds a lot like her, to be honest.) Option C is what she'd do if she isn't doing options A or B. Option D is a subtype of option A.
This is a dream and Ileosa isn't very concerned about how she comes across to the 'audience of people she'll probably never meet,' but her minor concern can be the tie-breaker; out of the honest answers, option C makes her look the best.
"Option C."
"Okay! This next question seems less job-related."
"In the course of you assisting a childhood friend in physically getting their money back from a swindler, the thief insinuates violence. Do you bail?
A. I'd turn on both of them.
B. Why leave when things are just getting good?
C. I probably can reason with the thief first.
D. First of all, inform the authorities about the theft."
"Probably not amazing, but the thief probably isn't amazing either, by the standards you normally have in your real life."
Well, that makes things very simple, doesn't it. If the swindler is just some oaf, if Ileosa-the-pleb is down on her luck, wrestling pigs in the mud for the sake of her equally plebulous friends, Ileosa can hold the rogue with daze or knock him out with sleep, let alone wasting a second-circle suggestion. "Option B, then."
Ileosa is so overqualified for this that it almost hurts. Ileosa is furious at the hypothetical swindler for making her get her hands dirty. In the hypothetical, she's probably stabbing a man without adventurer toughness to death over less than 5 gp. It feels almost disproportionate. It'd be horrifying if it weren't entirely the other guy's fault. So she's really, really angry at him.
"All right."
"If riches are a life goal for you, what is your plan for attaining it?
A. I don't know.
B. Use others to fatten my pockets.
C. By any means necessary.
D. Anything that's constructive."
"By 'constructive' here, Tasha probably means things which are also at least somewhat helpful to other people. Like, if you're an amazing singer and good at navigating the music industry and get rich by way of huge numbers of people wanting to attend your concerts and buy recordings of you, that's constructive. She's not specifically referring to assembling buildings."
Option C is the superset that contains options B and D. "Option C, then?"
"I don't write the questions."
"You want to settle down with someone. Do you choose the disloyal person who has lots of money or the very loyal person who has little money?
A. Follow the money.
B. The loyal person who has little money
C. Either one will do.
D. The loyal person who has lots of money - I know they're out there."
Ileosa is not married. Ileosa is not disfigured by pox. Ileosa is not going to have to work, to live comfortably. She can settle down with a disloyal person who has a lot of money. This is a tremendous relief to her.
But, hm. Ileosa is not. She's not terribly fond of being married, is the thing. It's been a lot harder to put up with than she'd thought it'd be.
She should pick option A. She really should pick option A. But she's considering option D.
"Can you operationalize disloyal? I can easily compromise on sexual fidelity. But I... would prefer to marry someone without certain common correlates of infidelity, and who is loyal in other respects."
"I don't actually know if the author was referring just to mild cases of sexual infidelity, or to a spouse, say, starting an affair, realizing they love the affair partner more than they love you, and divorcing you to be with the affair partner. Probably disloyalty should carry at least some risk of the latter?"
Well, Ileosa doesn't love that idea.
Being a divorcee would ruin her life.
If you'd asked her four years ago, she might have proposed marrying the rich man and just putting a lot of effort into policing her husband and keeping him in love with her. Ileosa has rather dramatically soured on that strategy.
In this hypothetical, Ileosa is unmarried, beautiful, and, one way or another, going do better than someone who might divorce her.
"Option D."
"Okay."
"By some fluke you are able to be invisible for 24 hours only once. What does such a day look like for you?
A. I'd be busy cleaning homes of those who are shut-in.
B. Like the best day EVER!
C. Just like any other day
D. Divulging that would defeat the purpose."
"I'm not actually sure what's meant by A. I think it means, like, specifically cleaning the homes of people who are too afraid of people to go out or hire cleaners or such? Because normally people who can't leave their homes don't specifically benefit from invisible cleaners. I'm not actually sure people in that situation benefit from invisible cleaners either, really, it would cause paranoia."
Ileosa is inclined to agree with her dream person that cleaning houses is a bizarre use of invisibility!
"Would I be invisible as invisibility, or as greater invisibility?"
"If there is any battle that the hypothetical version of myself has been preparing for or putting off, it would most likely be wise to force the fight while the spellbuff's still running." The hypothetical version of herself has to fight her own battles and stab petty criminals in her own person, because she's poor, but the meager silver lining to this is that wizards and the state won't care any more about her pathetic nemeses than they do her pathetic self. She could probably get away with murder.
If there aren't any battles that she's been putting off, or when she's finished with them... well, she could steal things, or break into houses to snoop on people, and blow on the backs of people's necks, and pull people's hair, and frighten women, and spit in food, and generally make a pest of herself. "Option B, I think."
"Okay."
"You walk behind someone you know has been begging in the hot sun all day, and they mistakenly drop a dollar bill from their small pail of earnings. Do you pick up the bill and run?
A. I leave the dollar there for someone else who probably needs it and I give the beggar two dollars.
B. I'd give the beggar the money back minus my finder's fee.
C. They'll be back to pick up that money.
D. What dollar bill?"
"For context, someone taking this quiz might routinely be spending multiple dollars on coffee several times a week."
"More on the subject of money:"
"Many successful people have said that money is meant to be spent. Do you agree?
A. I'd rather save my money.
B. Spending and profiting from other people's money is the key to success.
C. Who has that kind of time or money to spend?
D. Spend your money on me if you want to be successful."
"These options aren't mutually exclusive. The world contains two kinds of money; money that is yours, and money that isn't. With your own money, you should be mean and frugal. But the key to success is, yes, to spend and profit from other people's money. A is true, but incomplete, B too is true, but also incomplete. I'll say B."
"All right then. Thanks for sharing your thoughts, it would be pretty boring if you just picked letters."
"While in the comfort of your own home, you look through your window and notice a neighbor kicking another neighbor's cat. The cat needs medical assistance as a result. What's your reaction?
A. I hold the cat for ransom.
B. No reaction here
C. I bribe the kicker.
D. I immediately inform the authorities about the matter."
Apparently Ileosa isn't entertaining enough for this dream person. Well excuse her for being taciturn in her own dream. But okay. Sure. She can fill the air.
"I have no idea how I would hold the cat for ransom. If I'm supposed to be imagining a scenario where that makes any amount of sense, then, sure, I hold the cat for ransom. B is a more realistic option, since this doesn't concern me. I can't see any reason to bribe the kicker. Am I supposed to be bribing the kicker to kick fewer cats, in this scenario? To kick more cats? I really cannot over-emphasize how little I care about the cats. I will pick option D or something like it if I dislike my neighbor and wish them ill. Do I dislike my neighbor and wish them ill?"
"Your choice. A lot of people who take this quiz do care about cats so would plausibly start disliking their neighbor over this."
"If you don't like this quiz, we can go for a different one. I haven't reviewed the contents of 'which D&D villain should you betray the party for and take on a hot date?' recently – uh, this would be about what sort of antagonist initially Good or Neutral adventurers should betray their adventuring party for – but it might be interesting. You just won't get results from this one if you don't finish it, though."
Ileosa kind of wants to finish this one - she doesn't like being distracted from a task half-done - but she also wants to know, "What are D&D villains?"
"Aboleths, Abrogail Thrune, dragons with interesting schemes, those sorts of people. D&D is a game for people pretending to be adventurers."
Okay, that quiz sounds like a lot of fun, actually.
"Can we finish this one first? If I have long enough before I'm going to wake up?"
"We can certainly try! I don't actually know how long it will be before you wake up. Uh, this next question also assumes you have a job and aren't self-employed."
"Your tipsy boss wants to talk politics at a party. Do you get chummy?
A. I'd engage, get them relaxed and wait for them to spill the beans on intel that'd benefit me.
B. I'd express my opinions with no fear.
C. No office party for me, thanks.
D. I'd feel bad about lying, but I would agree openly with everything my boss says."
"Is my boss politically involved, or just a sports fan?"
"There are many sports one can be a fan of; horse races, fencing, boxing, stickball, bloodsport, lacrosse, war, and politics. What distinguishes a fan from an athlete, is whether they participate, or just watch from the stands."
"Ah. You and your boss probably technically participate in politics in that you both are likely citizens of the country you live in which is a democracy, so you have the vote. When there's an election coming up you get mailed advertisements for candidates, probably. But let's say your boss isn't an elected official or otherwise highly involved in politics, so it's a combination of caring about politics without participation and trying to sway the votes of miscellaneous listeners."
"A democracy."
Specifically, a republic; there are elections.
Representative democracy is not a very good form of government. And, Ileosa will repeat that out loud, to fill the air and keep the dream person entertained.
"Representative democracy is not a very good form of government. Democracy lacks nearly every virtue of a Lawful government, and Lawful government is the better half of why humans live better than harpies. So not only is my hypothetical self destitute, she must put up with witch-hunts, and anarchy, and guillotines, and piracy, and invasions. The one countervailing benefit is that a private citizen has an easier time ascending to public life in a chaotic climate, but I'd rather go to Hell without a contract than be stuck in a final blade. But I suppose I'd have to give it a try nonetheless. On the question itself, I would of course get chummy with my tipsy boss. I would not feel bad about lying, which makes my answer A."
"I don't actually think your alternate self puts up with those. Or, I mean, she might end up with drama that gets called witch hunts, but it's rare for it to end in people dying, it's more likely to lead to people being publicly shamed and losing employment, and it's not government-led. In Tasha's context, democracies are much less prone to famine than other forms of government, and people theorize that democracies are less likely to fight each other though that's more debated. The famine issue has got to be related to crop growth improvements, once you're good enough at growing crops a lot of what leads to famine is political. …but this isn't actually intended to be a political quiz."
Ileosa does not want to be shamed and lose her employment, that sounds horrible. And it's not even government led, at this point? Maybe that's what Andoran Province would look like after a generation of 'citizens' reared to feel entitled to Codwin's humiliation spectacles.
"I don't understand why a more volatile political system would tend to reduce famine... we can move on to the next question if you'd rather that than discuss this one."
"Let's not worry about it for now, we can talk politics later. …oh, this is a silly one."
"Use the emergency door marked "Alarm will sound," or no?
A. No. I'd keep looking for the right way to exit.
B. Push through and run
C. Push through and walk
D. I'd push through if it was for an emergency."
"I would... push through it if it was for an emergency, I suppose. Why is there a door that is only for emergencies? Does it open somewhere unpleasant?"
"It just goes outside. It allows for faster evacuation or enables evacuation if the main doors are blocked, but the alarm means that, when the building is normally operating, people only have to monitor the main doors. And that if someone opens it in the event of an actual emergency, like something catching fire, people who can't see the fire may still be prompted to evacuate by the alarm."
"A clever system. In that case, I would use the emergency exit only in case of an emergency, to avoid raising the alarm."
"That makes sense. I don't really understand this question, if they want it to be a genuine dilemma they should give you some kind of reason to want to leave the building quickly that isn't formally an emergency. Anyway, we have another horseless carriage question. Let's say you're driving at a speed of at least 25 miles per hour, your carriage can probably do 60 no problem but in this context the speed limit is much lower than that."
"Brake for a puppy crossing the street, or drive erratically to avoid it and save time?
A. What puppy?
B. I'd get out of my car and direct traffic to keep the dog safe.
C. I'd wait.
D. I veer. Move out of my way, drivers and dog!"
...That's a pretty fast horseless carriage.
"I don't think it's safe to drive these carriages at ground level, let alone the same streets as pedestrians and puppies."
"Drivers are legally required to pass driving tests before they get permission to drive horseless carriages on public roads. Even so, motor vehicle crashes are the primary cause of death for people your age, where Tasha likely comes from. There's a little more than one fatality per hundred million vehicle miles traveled. People really like being able to travel quickly, though. Uh, the streets get designed so that there's parts for pedestrians which are physically elevated above the parts for drivers by several inches, and there are places where signs and lights tell drivers to stop to make it easier for pedestrians to cross. But lots of people complain the system favors drivers going fast over pedestrians not dying."
There are parts of the street for pedestrians, elevated by several whole inches, wow.
"I'm going to hit the dog. If this is the primary cause of death for people my age, I need practice controlling the carriage when it impacts a living thing."
"Okay then. Let's call that option A."
"This next question assumes you're renting an apartment in a building with many other apartments, and that you continue to have indoor plumbing."
"The super wants to fix a leak from your unit. Do you let them in to stop a flood below you?
A. What superintendent? What leak? What neighbor? What 10 million knocks on my door?
B. I guess so.
C. Yeah, but I want a rent discount for the inconvenience.
D. My lease stipulates that I am to allow the superintendent access to my unit in these cases. "
"Does my lease stipulate that I am to allow the superintendent access to my unit in these cases?"
"Probably. Flooding damages the building so it's the kind of thing any sane landlord would want to include."
"Should I infer from option C being listed, that I think there's any chance it could work?"
"You might think there's any chance. I don't know how viable this kind of gambit would be, really, I never tried this kind of thing with a landlord myself."
"I think the options are A and D, then. I can let the superintendent into my room, or I can pretend to be asleep. Which option I pick somewhat depends on what the super is interrupting, and also somewhat depends on whether I live alone, how safe I feel around the superintendent, and whether I think I could outfight him or her if it came to that."
"I really don't think the superintendent is going to assault you. And it would be reasonable to suppose that you're eating dinner, or cooking food, or watching illusion shows, or such. I don't know if you live alone or not, but if you lived with a roommate or partner they would probably have some kind of opinion, so maybe we should assume alone?"
"In that case, my answer is D. The interruption is inconvenient, but, it's a reasonable request, and it's on the lease."
"All right. Next is another horseless carriage question."
"A traffic officer gives you a speeding ticket. Do you contest it?
A. No. I probably was driving too fast.
B. I'll pay it. The police need to make their daily quotas. They caught me slippin'.
C. I contest the ticket.
D. I'd bribe the officer. I don't need any more points."
"To be clear, the penalty for speeding is generally a monetary fine. Contesting the ticket wouldn't involve arguing on the spot, it would involve arguing in court later. However, your insurance provider will probably charge you more when they hear about it because it suggests you're a reckless driver, and if you commit lots of traffic infractions you accumulate 'points' which can make you lose your driver's license."
Ileosa does not want to lose her driver's license. She wants the mobility, and needs the attack power.
"How likely am I to successfully contest the speeding ticket? Is it my word against the traffic officer's?"
"The officer might have used instruments to measure your speed, which can be somewhat persuasive. In that case you'd need to request records about whether the instruments were calibrated recently and whether the officer was trained with them. On the other hand, if you happened to have trustworthy instruments monitoring your carriage and they showed you weren't speeding, that would be very helpful. And there's some chance the officer just wouldn't show up so you'd win that way."
"Until this question, none of the answers I've seen had an associated moral alignment that leapt out at me, but option A is clearly a Lawful mindset, if not an intelligent Lawful mindset. As I am not a golem or an idiot, I will not choose option A.
"Option D must be what the traffic officer is expecting from me, but it might not be cheap, since the implication of option B is that I'm implicitly bidding against other drivers and the lowest bidders fill out the quota.
"Option C might be the best one: why would the traffic officer want to waste time in a courtroom that he could instead spend accosting drivers? The traffic officer needs only to attend the court often enough to instill dread in those from whom he solicits bribes. The bold and courageous course of action is to contest the ticket.
"But, lacking familiarity with the disposition of the courts and with the range of possible outcomes, I'll do the safe thing and just pay off the officer."
"That's actually not the safe thing in context. The officer isn't expecting a bribe and might be insulted. The safe thing is just paying the fine to the government."
Her democracy is somehow worse than Korvosa, wow, okay.
"If the traffic officers don't want money, then what are they getting out of stopping drivers." She doesn't understand this part. She's never understood this part! Ileosa does not understand what is wrong with people like Cressida Kroft. "I mean, obviously, the officers are paid to meet their quota, and if they dread punishment for taking bribes I can assume that the lord - or, rather, the elected representative - I can assume the representative appointed an ideological Hellknight from the Order of the Snail as his magistrate of traffic officers, and the Hellknight is religiously committed to punishing everyone who exceeds the snail's sacred pace. I have seen systems like this, the Korvosan Guard is like this. But what I don't understand is why anyone is steering for it!"
She struggles for the words.
"No one should want this. The representative shouldn't want it, because he'll have to better pay his magistrate, the magistrate shouldn't want it, because she'll have to better pay her traffic officers, and expend unlimited energies policing her police force, the traffic officers shouldn't want it, because however well they're paid, they could be better paid by also taking bribes, and we citizens being accosted do not want it, because we cannot bribe the officers! And yet you say I risk offending the traffic officer by offering a bribe, and, to my infinite frustration, I cannot say, four years now a resident of Korvosa, that this is not in keeping with my understanding of human nature. And I am certain that in the hypothetical scenario, my fellow citizens, of whom I am a subject, are incredibly satisfied with the disaster they've imposed on us."
"To begin, carriage crashes are more destructive at speed. They can kill and injure people, damage carriages, and create road obstructions. The purpose of speed limits is to prevent crashes. Nobody is a member of the Hellknight Order of the Snail."
"The representative selfishly wants to slow traffic because they can use some tax revenue, and dead people don't pay taxes, and injured people and people with damaged carriages are worse at it. Plus, he profits from fines. The police chief is plausibly selfishly in favor because in the absence of traffic laws, she wouldn't get the funding to hire any traffic officers, and she might also profit from fines. There's, uh, actually a bit of a problem where some towns will set poorly indicated speed limits to profit from people missing the indicators and then not contesting charges, but that's tangential. The traffic officers will be fired for taking bribes and are acculturated to find bribery disrespectful and an attempt to evade fair punishment."
"And the citizens want speed limits because they don't want to be harmed by carriage crashes. Most crashes are caused by reckless driving. A lot of people who get into crashes were thinking something like 'well, I am such a good driver that I can drive however I like without crashing'. It's convenient to penalize these people before they actually get into a crash, the same way it's convenient to have it be a crime to throw knives around even if you don't hit people. Plus, reckless drivers force other drivers to be more careful on the road, which is annoying, so it can feel nice when some other reckless driver is pulled over by traffic officers."
Ileosa is reassured by the traffic officers in small towns hiding the speed limit indicators; it's grounding to see sane behavior from villagers even in the dream democracy.
"To be clear, I understand that a representative might selfishly want everyone else on the road to drive slowly, and I am grateful for it. This is why Lawful humans live better than Chaotic harpies; tyranny brings prosperity. Certainly I, like anyone else on this planet, would rather be the tyrant who the streets are cleared for so my coachman can race at any speed, but if I can't be the tyrant, by all means, let the roads be policed! I am no friend of Chaos.
"What I find mystifying is..." everything. The whole thing is fractally mystifying.
"I'll describe what I'd expect speed limit enforcement to look like in a democracy, and perhaps you can tell me where my expectations fail me.
"The representative is annoyed by carriage crashes, and decrees that henceforth no one will exceed a certain speed, excepting only his soldiers, his officers, the clergy, and so on and so forth. Every sensible person applauds this diktat, which will reduce their odds of being hit by an incompetently piloted carriage. Alas, it is in no one's personal interest to be the only one driving slowly, so until traffic officers are appointed, no change is made.
"But traffic officers are appointed shortly. These officers are to chase and halt horseless carriages, boarding them if necessary. If a traffic officer writes your name in too many places, you will lose license to drive your horseless carriage, which is your primary means of transportation and self-defense. Being a traffic officer is a dangerous job, but many nonetheless apply to this government program, because they want to make the streets safer, or punish the guilty, or avenge themselves on enemies, or circle up, but mostly because they want to collect bribes.
"So the traffic officers fan out, stopping who they please and extracting bribes from them. And because those who are exceeding the speed limit have more to fear from being taken to court, the traffic officers can extract larger bribes from them, likely exceeding the value of nominal fine, since no one wants to lose their license to drive a carriage. And so everyone tries to avoid the traffic officers' attention, and the roads are consequently safer.
"Now, the representative and the police chief doesn't get as much revenue from fines, this way, as the representative would, hypothetically, if the traffic officers were stopping just as many carriages and taking them all to court. But... in practice, almost everywhere I've ever been, enforcers just collected bribes and also collected fines? The traffic officers wouldn't be able fine as many people through the formal system as they're able to solicit bribes from! It'd be worse for enforcement! The police chief is already setting a quota for fines. She'll get her cut. And the representative will get his. If the traffic officers can't take bribes, they need to be paid more in their regular salary, which comes from the public purse, and this seems worse in every way."
"Firstly, the representative is not going to formally exclude himself or the clergy or such. He does exclude various government employees, but only when they're using government carriages and are playing a special horn they're only supposed to use for emergencies and which also directs other drivers to pull over. If someone takes a government carriage with the special horn running to a restaurant, instead of to the hospital or the site of an emergency or such, citizens won't be happy."
"Secondly: Being a police officer involves some danger, but it's so far as I can tell more than 8 times safer than logging, and also safer than fishing, roofing, garbage collection, and many other jobs. There's no real benefit to the danger either, nobody circles up."
"And there aren't that many chases, because of license plates. Every carriage is supposed to have identifying marks on it which the government issues. They make it easier to find vehicles involved in crimes, so even if the driver gets away, the government can go after them later. Anyway. Normally the traffic officers direct a speeding driver to pull over by using the horn and lights on their car. If the driver ignores this, they can face much more severe penalties, so they'll usually pull over. Carriage chases do happen sometimes, but they can be risky to police and bystanders, so they're considered undesirable."
"Drivers don't lose their licenses from first infractions, generally. People argue over whether it's too hard to lose one's license."
"I really don't know what to tell you about the bribery. I'm not familiar with the exact details myself. My understanding is that people will try to be police officers because they like the idea of doing good, they like the idea of doing interesting work, and the state pays well. I think there is some indirect corruption sometimes, like, police officers will sometimes be more lenient on people with visible signals of having donated money to local-police-related charities, but most drivers don't make donations like that."
"I think citizens and elected representatives think things are better when the police don't take bribes, even though that means they need to spend more tax money on police. When the police aren't out for bribes, the public tends to trust them somewhat more, which is useful for policing. Judges also tend to trust testimony from officers more when the officers aren't taking bribes. Also, the people who would get pushed for bribes are often voting citizens, who don't like being pushed for bribes, and they'd prefer representatives who made the police department stop doing that."
Being a police officer involves some danger, but it's so far as I can tell more than 8 times safer than logging
Because logging happens in forests! Gods of the pit, you can't compare logging to other kinds of work.
and also safer than fishing, roofing, garbage collection, and many other jobs.
Oh, huh, alright. That undercuts her point.
Still, logging is an outlier and shouldn't be listed.
It seems like the dream person doesn't have much better an idea of why there's a culture opposed to bribery than Ileosa has.
(Which is a pity because Korvosa has a similar problem and Ileosa has grown increasingly frustrated with it.)
"Thank you for your explanations and answers. I'm going to change my response, then, and contest the ticket in court."
"Okay. Next we have a vague political question, so feel free to not make up any hypotheticals this time."
"An individual's rights are more important than the rights of the group, correct?
A. Always
B. Sometimes
C. Very seldom
D. Never"
"Everyone thinks their rights are more important than the rights of the group, and no one else's are. I'm one of everyone, so I think my rights are more important than the rights of the group, and no one else's are. I guess that makes my answer C?"
"Okay."
"Should an entire group of people suffer for the sins of an individual from that group?
A. No. You never really understand why any individual does anything. Why punish the group for something we don't fully comprehend?
B. It depends on the severity of the damage.
C. It depends on what the individual did.
D. Yes. That's the natural order."
"Option C contains option B, and is also the correct answer. Collective punishment is sometimes, but not always, the answer. It depends on details."
"Yeah, sometimes answers will contain each other that way. One time I saw one where an answer was 'Step in and question the situation. Then try to find a fair and just resolution to the issue.'."
"While in prison, do you escape with other inmates, or snitch for perks?
A. Snitch and receive prison privileges until the next debacle.
B. I tell the warden because it's the right thing to do.
C. I tell the warden in spite of the privileges.
D. I tell another prisoner and trick them to tell the warden. We split the privileges."
Ileosa wonders what the other answers were, such that such a specific thing as 'find a fair and just resolution to the issue' contained them, but she's distracted from chasing this down by -
Ileosa doesn't want to be in prison! Ileosa really doesn't want to be in prison!
"...Which is the option for escaping with the other inmates?"
That... is really funny, actually. She may have been expecting too much coherency from this dream.
"As I have no option to escape, and as I have four options to tell the warden about the planned escape, I suppose I'll tell the warden! Option A, then."
"Okay. Next we have another horseless carriage question. They're called cars for short."
"You capture video of your neighbor hitting your parked car. They say nothing. What now?
A. What rock through my neighbor's window that very same night?
B. I take my dent and my footage to court. I'm suing!
C. I get my car fixed and ask the neighbor to reimburse me. If they don't, oh well.
D. I contact law enforcement with the footage."
"Like, hitting enough to do damage, maybe with their carriage or such."
Do! Not! Hit! Ileosa's! Car!
"Which option would cause my neighbor the greatest suffering?"
The questioner laughs. "Definitely B or D but I'm not sure which. I guess I'd expect D to actually be useful for B? If you go to the police with your footage and they decide not to investigate, you might still get police records useful for court. The thing is, suing your neighbor is more work for you, also. I guess I think B? It's the most effort on your part and the reason you'd go through that effort is wanting to win."
Why is Ileosa being laughed at? She doesn't deserve this.
"Then, my answer is A, B, C, and D. We can gloss that as 'D.'"
(It's glossed as D because D is the most aggressive and hostile option.)
(Sorry, Ileosa, but 'I want the response to a car problem to be the one which makes my enemies suffer most' is just objectively funny when you're not actually torturing your enemies or such!)
"That rock really isn't going to help with your court case or such. Anyway."
"Do you share the abundant spoils of a thieving friend, or snitch for reward money?
A. I want to bring those who've broken the law to justice.
B. Rob the friend. Who are they gonna tell, the authorities?
C. I'd tell my friend that I intend to snitch to give them a head start.
D. I bribe my friend to reap some of the theft riches before I turn my friend in to collect the reward money."
"I'm surprised there isn't a regular 'share' option here, but it is what it is."
"There's no option to share and there's no option to stay uninvolved. Out of the options given, A is absurd, matched only by C, which is even more so, leaving B and D. Either option burns the friendship, but B leaves an enemy in play while D is more profitable. In for a penny, in for a dollar; I choose D."
"All right."
"Do you sacrifice your well-being for the comfort of others?
A. Never
B. Only if I can get something out of it
C. Yes. We're all in the 'soup.'
D. Only for friends and family"
"If you sacrifice your well-being for anything, you've made a mistake, by the definition of well-being. In that sense, B is an incoherent thing to say. I have and will continue to occasionally suffer for the comfort of creatures I'm friends with, related to, or in a soup together with, and I don't think I'm making mistakes there. But this question has a single correct answer which any sane person must necessarily choose, and that answer is A.
...But probably B is the answer that will give the rubric a more accurate impression of me, so that's my answer. I'm not Chaotic Evil."
"All right."
"Your partner's dog chewed up your favorite pair of shoes that cost $1000. What's your retaliation plan, if any?
A. What dog? I don't see any dog.
B. It's only fair that I get reimbursed something, maybe not the full amount.
C. I want my money back with interest or the dog must leave.
D. No retaliation. I just want all of my money back."
"Our previous contestant for this quiz was actually an adventurer, and they complained that any shoes that expensive should really hold up to plenty of dog bites, so really this incident is the manufacturer's fault."
"Are these Chelish dollars? Are the shoes as expensive as they sound?"
"They're pretty expensive! Personally I think this is an irresponsible amount of money to spend on shoes. I think a thousand dollars could get you a pound of low-grade saffron, or a fifth of an ounce of gold. There are some older used carriages selling for around eight thousand dollars but I don't know how good they are."
I was going to have Ileosa write a tag about how much cheaper or more expensive saffron was in the dream democracy, but, absolutely incredibly, the prices of gold and saffron relative to each other are pretty much the same as what they were three hundred years ago.
The planet industrialized and the population climbed to eight billion, but every factor that might have increased or decreased the price of gold, was exactly balanced by a factor that might have increased the or decreased the price of saffron, and it all canceled out.
What.
"You can buy a car for," mental math, "ten Absalom pounds?"
That is not a lot of gold!!
"It's probably not going to be a very good car? I don't know how much an Absalom pound is, and I don't understand the car market that well."
"An Absalom pound is a gold coin which weighs a third of an ounce, and a soldier or waged laborer might earn two pounds a week before food and drink. Ten Absalom pounds is three and a half ounces of gold, which could buy sixteen pounds of saffron or seven pairs of satin shoes but not a first-circle scroll let alone a pegasus let alone a car."
"I was going to comment on the price of satin shoes, because satin pillowcases sell for less than ten dollars and surely a pillowcase uses more satin than a shoe because pillows are bigger than feet. But it turns out the fashionable shoe market is kind of crazy and I can't tell from the pictures whether things allegedly containing satin should meaningfully count, there's all these absurd creations which are mostly straps and bows and heels."
"Anyway. It kind of sounds like gold is weirdly common in your world? It looks like a recently enlisted active-duty soldier in the country Tasha is probably from gets around 2400 dollars a month which I think is around 0.55 ounces of gold, and it sounds like you're saying the soldiers earn 0.7 ounces. But actually the active-duty soldiers get food and housing as part of the job, and I don't know how much soldiers in your world spend on food. Also I checked the prices on horses and there are horses that are cheaper than moderately cheap used horseless carriages, but a lot of horses are more expensive, even ignoring the thing where horses need care every day."
Ileosa wants to wear the shoes that are mostly straps and bows and heels.
"It sounds to me like gold is weirdly rare on your world... but why is saffron so expensive?"
"It takes a big field of flowers to make a little bit of saffron and people have to harvest the threads by hand, we don't have good enough machines for it yet."
Ileosa doesn't get it.
"Why can't you repurpose some of the various mechanisms for laundering clothes and running messages and so on?"
"I'm not sure how to describe this well without a lot of thinking so I'm going to give you a simplified version that might be wrong in some parts."
"We're good at many things which involve spinning things, and tiny bits of lightning which we usually get by spinning things. You can clean clothes by spinning them around a lot in a barrel with stuff for them to bump into and with water and soap, and then changing water and draining it and such. You make a carriage go by spinning the wheels. You send fast messages by sending the right pattern of lightning bits along a wire. But we're bad at making machines that do delicate movement tasks in an environment that isn't perfectly controlled, and that's what saffron harvesting is. …There are some garments that can't be washed in normal washing machines because they're too delicate, too."
Her dream is doing such fascinating worldbuilding, wow. Ileosa wants to read a story set on Spinworld. Ileosa wants a spinning chain flail that is ridiculously dangerous to try and use but pulverizes everything that dares to melee her. She hopes she remembers this dream when she wakes up.
"I see. One more question. My partner with the dog. Is this a romantic partner, or a business partner? And if he's a romantic partner, did he buy me the shoes?"
"It's got to be a romantic partner, normally your business partner wouldn't be bringing their dog to a place you'd also have left a pair of fancy shoes you aren't wearing. I don't know if they bought you the shoes, it probably depends on whether you try to date the kind of person who buys their partners fancy shoes. Oh, also, for context, 'romantic partner' can refer to a long-term boyfriend or girlfriend or such, this person isn't necessarily your husband or wife."
"I have an okayish view of you? You're a young woman, you have pale skin and red hair and … I think bluish or greenish eyes … and a crown and nice braids and a green and white dress and a hand fan?"
"Same-sex marriage is legal in the country where the quiz's target audience is probably concentrated, and has been for multiple years before its publication."
Well that's interesting. If Ileosa has to raise her eyebrows any more often, they're going to get stuck that way.
"In Korvosa, married women can't own property unless it's specified otherwise in their marriage contract. I presume this isn't a common failure mode on Spinworld, but it would be very funny if it were."
Ileosa considers same-sex marriage.
"On the surface of things, there doesn't seem to be much point to same-sex marriage, as producing offspring requires a member of either sex, but there may be edge cases where it could be useful even knowing that no legitimate children would result of the union. Although it seems to me an excellent legal hack, it's hard to say I approve, as it advantages very few people, and is unfortunate for any spare sons and daughters consigned by their parents to same-sex marriages... but then again, on the other hand, same-sex marriage would double the marriageable options for any woman who was also a second-circle arcanist, and broaden the space of possible marriages where she joins as the senior partner, as is her due as a caster. I am persuaded of Spinworld's wisdom."
"I think usually in the main country the author is writing for people's parents don't pick who they marry? And, uh, most people are only attracted to the opposite sex and don't even consider a same-sex marriage."
Spinworlders all marry for love, and they are all so committed to marrying for love that they let anyone marry anyone?
Where did these people come from oh wait that's right Ileosa dreamt them up.
"My wife buys me shoes, and given that, it would be quite bold of me to complain about her dog or pursue revenge on the beast... but, reviewing my options, all four are this bold. And in any case, if I am to follow the Spinworld custom of marrying for love, there is no guarantee that my wife is wealthy, and not some poor talented beauty like myself. So I will imagine that I bought the shoes. And that I buy her shoes." Ileosa really likes the idea of buying her wife shoes. "And I'll need my shoes replaced, or the dog must leave."
"Not sure this next one is a Spinworld hypothetical where you want to imagine being in the country the usual readers are probably in."
"There's a widespread famine that's lasted for months. Food is scarce, but you have enough canned food in your basement to feed several families for one year. Care to share your reserves?
A. What reserves?
B. Only when people start getting really sick.
C. Just a portion, not all of it.
D. Definitely."
"Canning's a Spinworld food preservation method, though, it works on things like already-cooked stews."
"As I have enough for several families, I might risk sharing some with my allies, but I wouldn't want it to get out that I could be profitably robbed. Option C."
"In which political office would you do the most good for people?
A. Archnemesis
B. City council
C. None
D. President"
"This is a weird question, archnemesis isn't a real office. For context, president here refers to being the president of the country, so it's a more powerful role than city council."
"There's a rumor going around about your shady past. How do you respond?
A. 'It's all lies.'
B. 'What exactly did you hear?'
C. 'It's probably false.'
D. 'OK. It's true.'"
If you don't want to tell the truth, you can always,
"Option A, it's all lies."
"Next is another one where you have a regular job, unfortunately."
"Your co-worker has been promoted to be your supervisor; the two of you started the job at the same time and at the same level. Could you handle this new relationship?
A. I'd trip them up. They'd be out the door by the time I'm finished with them.
B. Time for a new job
C. I'd probably get a lot done with a former co-worker as my supervisor.
D. Who cares? Someone has to do the job."
"Why were they promoted over me, and I not promoted over them?"
"I don't know. Maybe they did better work. Maybe your mutual boss liked them more than you for some other reason, like, maybe your boss doesn't like people who want to marry people of the same sex, or maybe they're a relative of your boss, or maybe they're having sex with your boss, or something."
That's just about the shape of it.
"Depending on the specifics, I may go to war with them. An attempt to oust them is unlikely to work if they have familial connections, and the fact that they were chosen over me suggests some ability to politic, but it seems likely enough that I could do a better job than them at sleeping with our boss. My answer is A, aspirationally, or B, should I fail, or D, should I determine the war unwinnable and refuse to wage it to begin with. Let's say option A."
"All right."
"You travel to another country where the laws are quite different than the laws in your home country. Do you make it a point to abide by these different laws?
A. I'm not looking for any laws. I want to have a good time.
B. Oh yeah? Let's see what happens if I break some laws over there.
C. I'd ignore those laws like I ignore every other law.
D. I would have already read up on the laws and customs before traveling there."
"...These options are distressingly Chaotically phrased, but I admit that I did not read the entire Korvosan book of Law before settling in this country. It's not a short book, and, really, unless your plans turn on some arcane point of Mephistophelean minutia, you can generally guess what the Law in practice is, if not the Law in writing, before you need to check. I did read Korvosan marriage, inheritance, and succession law, and other things I knew would be relevant to me, which I suppose makes my answer D... although, I have broken laws while in this country, which might make my answer B? I can get away with it, though, I'm literally the queen. I'll say option D."
"'Read up on' means 'did some research on', not 'read every sentence of'. Often there's some well-known but unintuitive ones, like, in the big Spinworld country I'm assuming normal readers are in you're allowed to drive cars at age 16 but not have strong drinks until age 21, and those numbers are different in other countries. But that's just more reason for you to pick option D, really."
"It's a fairly commonly broken law but people do get arrested for breaking it. The, uh, the water's a lot cleaner, and they have tasty beverages that aren't strong drinks."
"My idea is that sobriety is bad for the development of young people."
"Not that it's relevant to me if I visit Spinworld," Ileosa lies, "since I'm twenty-two."
"I think it is considered an unusually high drinking age, internationally."
"You get a flat tire on the road leading to your neighborhood. Will any of your neighbors in the passing cars stop and help you fix your tire?
A. Yup. I have dirt on all of them.
B. I'd call roadside assistance.
C. Yes. I'd expect to be treated how I'd treat others.
D. Naw. I'd better get to that flat tire before it gets dark."
"So, part of how your horseless carriage can travel quickly and smoothly is that its wheels have tubes which get inflated with air. A 'flat tire' means the air has come out of one of the tubes. Trying to drive like that is a bad idea. You might have a spare tire stored in your carriage to replace it with, but that would take work, which is easier with more than one person. 'Roadside assistance' would likely be an organization you paid in advance to come help you if this kind of thing happens, or maybe one you have to pay now, if you didn't pay in advance."
"I don't want anyone to drive their car into me while my own is disabled and I can't escape. How expensive is roadside assistance, and how much faster than replacing the tire alone? Can I use a device to alert someone I want to speak to, to bring their own car here and help me?"
"People probably aren't going to drive their car into you on purpose. According to some random source I don't really trust, if you paid in advance, it might be 68 to 170 dollars a year, and if you paid after an incident, it might be 75 to 250 dollars? But if you get lots of car problems, places you pay in advance for would probably charge you more next year. And you can probably use a device to alert someone you want to speak to to bring their own car there and help you. That's how you'd get commercial roadside assistance, probably, but it would work for a friend too. I don't know how long it would take to change a tire. Probably a while if you haven't done it before."
"I know that it's unlikely that someone with a grudge against me will notice my vulnerability and act on it inside the window, and, perhaps in Spinworld, where I'm not a queen and was never an Arvanxi, if I keep my head down, there might not be anyone who especially wants me dead. And I know it is unlikely that I'll be driven into by a robber in my own neighborhood, and unlikely that I'll be threatened with being driven into by a mugger or rapist. I know it's unlikely, on any given day, to die. I don't know how long I could wander Korvosa unarmed and unaccompanied and survive completely unharmed, but it would probably be for longer than it takes to change a tire. I still worry."
"I suspect if someone wanted to mug or rape someone stuck on the roadside with a damaged car they'd initially offer to drive the person somewhere and then drive to a different location, not, uh, threaten to hit them with a car. I, uh. I'm not quite sure how that would work in the rape case, in order to rape someone you tend to need to make physical contact with them and that seems pretty hard to do if you're sitting in the driver's seat and they're in front of or behind the car."
"And I would expect a robber to not want to drive into the car, because the car itself is likely the most valuable item you brought along, and it loses a lot of that value if damaged."
"Well, you could threaten to drive your car into a pedestrian if they don't drop their coin purse or bind their own hands - " that's not what's important, what's important is, "it doesn't sound like you expect people to drive their cars into pedestrians? Are cars easier to avoid on foot than I'm imagining, and motor vehicle crashes are mostly between two cars?"
"If you stop moving to yell a coherent threat to a pedestrian, the pedestrian will probably run away from the road, where your car will have more trouble traveling than they do."
"And I think it's most common for crashes to kill drivers. Some crashes are from drivers driving into large animals or trees or walls or such, so the only people who could die are people in the driver's car. People mostly don't crash their cars on purpose. They often do it because they were driving too quickly to stop for a pedestrian, or they weren't paying attention to the road, or their car is too tall and the pedestrian is a child they didn't notice, or they were too drunk to control the car, or such. I admit I don't have exact statistics about how many fatal car crashes are murder, though, because it's one of the contexts where it's easier for people to claim it was an accident."
"If people don't crash their cars on purpose, how in the world is it the leading cause of death for young adults?"
"Young adults die all the time! How are accidental car crashes more common than death in battle or in childbirth. Why do Spinworlders drive these things?"
"The relevant country isn't having any big wars and the maternal mortality rate is around 18 deaths per 100,000 live births, which plenty of citizens complain is too high compared to other reference countries. You're probably wondering if the death rate for stillbirths is higher, but I really think I would have heard of it if so, and there's technology that lets people notice a dead or obviously doomed fetus and deal with it early, which I expect would help."
Childbirth is dangerous. Ileosa doesn't have memorized numbers for how dangerous, but she has qualitative impressions and intuitions, and those qualitative impressions say that eighteen deaths in a hundred thousand is absurd.
(If you made an attempt to list one hundred thousand people for any purpose at all, Ileosa would be exasperated but not amazed to learn that merely doing so precipitated eighteen of their deaths!!)
Ileosa doesn't know off the top of her head how likely you are to die in childbirth if there isn't a healer on hand, or if there is, and doesn't know how often for most people there's a healer on hand. And the intuitions she does have, might be wrong outside Cheliax, since Chelish priests are only better at everything except for healing. (That's an uncomfortable thought. Oh, but actually, Cheliax has more wizards and witches than most places, in addition to having clerics, so probably Cheliax has more healing spells for childbirth. Ileosa is reassured.) But her general impression is: if there isn't a healer you're in for a lot of pain and will die on a critical failure; if there's a witch or cleric with stabilize prepared you're in the clear unless Pharasma really hates you; if you're relying on a limited number of prepared healing spells or spontaneous slots, you're probably going to live but should pray to all the gods that you don't start bleeding again after the spells run out. If Ileosa had to put numbers on her qualitative impression, she'd say that getting pregnant without knowing what your healing situation is going to be nine months down the road is the sort of thing that kills you one time in a hundred. (Which doesn't sound like a lot, at first, until you realize you'll need eight brats just to break even because half of them will get sick before they're five and half of the other half will be killed in battle or eaten by monsters, and until you realize that a fourth of pregnancies end in miscarriage or stillbirth and those can be lethal too. Hence why Ileosa expects high single-digit or low double-digit percentages of women to die in childbirth.)
Apparently on Spinworld, practically no one dies in childbirth. Which is very cool. Ileosa has so many questions.
"If no one dies in childbirth, I can see why accidental car crashes kill more people than childbirth does, but why are more people dying in accidental car crashes than monster attacks and intentional murders? And, and this I really must know, how do you heal people by spinning them?"
"A lot of this involves alchemy and I'm sure spinning things and lightning helps with the alchemy, you can separate substances with spinning sometimes and transform things like water with controlled lightning and of course it's good to not need to hand-mix things, but you have to understand I'm not an alchemist, ok? We generally don't spin the patients."
"My understanding is a lot of the causes look like blood loss, infections, high blood pressure, and the baby not coming out right."
"For blood loss, a lot of the time the issue is the uterus not contracting enough, and for that we have a drug that makes it contract more. The usual drug needs to be kept cold, and we have a system involving lightning and spinning parts for that. One of the simpler things we do involves putting a sterile balloon in the uterus and inflating it with sterile saltwater, presumably to use pressure to keep the blood in?"
"For high blood pressure, we use drugs to lower it and sometimes drugs to make the baby be born sooner, but of course if the baby is born too soon it can be in pretty bad shape, so it's complicated."
"For infections, we have some drugs. We also make sure things that touch the patient, like hands and surgical implements and bedding, are really clean."
"And for the baby not coming out right, we do surgery, often a c-section, which is much safer I think because we're better at preventing and treating infections, and because we've gotten better at some details of incision and stitches. I'd bet the stitches are also alchemical. And we can do blood transfusions if necessary."
Alchemical marvels of Spinworld!
It sounds like Spinworld has a huge number of alchemists, and consequently a huge variety of mundane alchemical items, drugs and water balloons and healing stitches, easy to use and stored at home. (Presumably they also have any number of healing potions, but potions will never sell for less than the cost of the reagents, so it makes sense that mundane alchemical items are also popular.) There's even a device for transferring blood from one person to another! It doesn't sound like Spinworld has anything that'd make a difference for a Golarion noble, but Ileosa is hugely pleased on behalf of her hypothetical Spinworld commoner self; between her own arcane healing and the drugs, balloons, stitches, and blood transfusion device in her medicine cabinet, neither Ileosa nor her wife are in much danger. (Eighteen chances in a hundred thousand!)
Or at least, neither of them are in much danger from childbirth.
"Spinworld sounds amazing in every respect except the frequency of car crashes. I understand that the relevant country is not in any desperate and existential war against a rival polity, but I remain disturbed that lethal motor vehicle accidents are more common than death at the hands of highwaymen, or at the jaws of monsters, or in scraps and duels with peers and enemies."
"The police go after highwaymen, they don't have the really powerful monsters Golarion does and people in fact killed so many wolves and such that now they're trying to restore the relevant population a bit though this gets pushback from ranchers, and they banned dueling."
"How terribly unreasonable of the ranchers, I can't imagine what they're thinking. How many young adults die in motor vehicle accidents?"
"Presumably the ranchers are thinking they don't want to lose any cattle and they don't really care as much about the effects of deer and elk overpopulation. Anyway. I think around 15 per hundred thousand in the relevant country? I'm calling people ages 15-24 young adults, though they only get permission to drive on their own starting at 16 and the vote and a bunch of other rights at 18."
"Asmodeus keep us from an overpopulation of deer and elk," Ileosa agrees, agreeably.
Restricting the vote to those eighteen years old or older is a perfectly sound policy, as far as Ileosa is concerned. Abyss, you could restrict it to twenty.
"So in Spinworld, young adults... mostly don't die."
...That's the exact same thing that the Spinworlder said earlier. Ileosa is going to keep talking in the hopes that they don't point it out.
"If you live to adulthood, you're almost certain to see the age of twenty-four, or thirty, forty." That sure is a thing to wrap her head around. "And the population quadruples every generation?"
"It went up a lot in the past century, and people got concerned that there would be too many people and a lot of starvation, but now people are having fewer kids everywhere. Sometimes not enough to replace the existing population. There's a lot of drama about it."
This makes no sense, but, "Are too many people getting same-sex married?"
"No. A lot of people aren't getting married at all and some aren't having kids when they do, there's cheap effective contraception."
"I suppose. And one would still need to be married, which is limiting by design... still, I wouldn't have expected cheap safe contraception to make a larger difference than reducing deaths in childbirth by a factor of one thousand. I would have guessed there were more women and couples desiring children but avoiding pregnancy for safety concerns, than there were those hoping to avoid parenthood but lacking wisdom or overcome by lust... that sounds ridiculous when spoken aloud and I want to emphasize that I know women are foolish and men callous, it's just, I also thought they were interested in having families. I hear more people complaining about too few children, than too many."
"It's good news for me, though, since on Spinworld any commoner can feed her family venison, and my teeming sons and daughters will inherit the tame and empty planet.
"My answer to the question is D. I'd change the tire myself, since there's no hurry."
"All right."
"Crime is up in your town and someone in your community invites you to participate in the neighborhood watch program. Do you contribute your time to help protect your village?
A. Sure. I'd need to watch those who unknowingly are watching me.
B. Where do I sign up!
C. Any reason to get together is a good reason.
D. That's a waste of my time."
"It suddenly occurs to me to ask, if crime is so low on this planet and monsters so few, whether I am an usually powerful warrior and spellcaster. I'm a second circle song-sorcerer whose suggestion lasts four hours, and I'm immune to sleep and cause fear."
No spellcasters? None?
"If I'm the only spellcaster on the entire planet, I'm going to try and conquer it. I'll need to find others with a talent for sorcerery and teach them to use it, introduce clerics in a controlled way... Barbatos is said to have sold His world to Hell, and was rewarded with a plane..."
"...But, wait, in the hypothetical, how was I the first to learn sorcerery? Or, invent it. Should I be assuming that in the hypothetical, I have no knowledge of or gift with magic?"
"I'm not sure whether I should assume in this scenario that I'm as fragile as firewood, or that I'm the sort of competent fighter favored to retain consciousness through being struck in the head with an axe, but either way, if I'm not better armed and armored than my adversary, without magic I'm certainly no more dangerous than a tall and powerful man. Nonetheless, I think I should like to join the neighborhood watch program. If there is crime in my idyllic Spintown, I want to do something about it, and if my neighbors are organizing for any purpose, I want to be involved in it, and if suspicion is to be cast and rules are to be enforced, I should like to have as close an eye as possible on who it's cast on and how it's enforced. Option B."
"That makes sense."
"You notice a former friend from grade school in a market that you just entered. Your former friend looks really good, like life has been good to them. Do you go after your old friend or let the past stay in the past?
A. I find my "friend," pretend to be someone else and shake them down for whatever I can get.
B. I'm sure that, like me, they wouldn't care.
C. Yes. I'd love to learn the secret to their success.
D. Only if I'm having a good hair day."
"Grade school is school people go through from ages around 5 to 14, or so."
"I'm sure I'd love to reminisce and catch up. Is option B meant to mean that my friend wouldn't mind talking with me, and so we should, or that they wouldn't care to talk with me, and so we shouldn't?"
"I'm honestly not sure, so I'd be tempted to suggest C because that definitely involves talking to them while not pretending to be someone else."
"Okay."
"A financially challenged sibling wants to stop paying you back a loan. What say you?
A. The payment schedule never stops, no matter what.
B. I don't care.
C. Interest goes up now.
D. I'd update the terms of our contract to better suit their new financial condition."
"I've never had cause to think this through, I'm an only child. I... am I fond of my sibling, in this scenario? I would like to be fond of my sibling. Would my sibling have my back, if our conditions were reversed? ...These questions of mine might be academic, because D is the correct option regardless of their answers. Option D."
"All right. We also have one bonus question, if you answer it I'll get you an imaginary toy car for the rest of the dream."
"There's a blood drive being held nearby. What do you do?
A. I ignore it. What's the point of getting poked with needles if it doesn't help me?
B. I go donate blood! It's important to help the sick.
C. I go donate blood! Other people will think better of me if they see I've donated.
D. I steal one of the stickers donors get when I think the staffers aren't looking."
Yes, please, Ileosa wants an imaginary toy car!
"I'm gathering from context that a blood drive is an event where friends of a sick or injured person, or woman with a difficult birth, are bled for transfusion? What's a sticker?"
"Oh, a blood drive is when a charity visits a place to ask people at the place to donate some of their blood so they can give it to injured strangers. The blood can be stored, so it doesn't get used for transfusion right away. A sticker is a piece of paper with a design on one side and an adhesive on the other, and blood drives can give donors stickers with their designs so the donors can display their generosity."
That. Sounds. Insane.
Why would you just give someone your blood? There's all kinds of stuff a stranger can do with your blood, ask Ileosa how she knows!
But... their planet doesn't have any spellcasters. So maybe to Spinworlders, the only consideration is the injury and blood loss. Which she could heal right off with cure light which she would have to heal the slow way, painfully. "Is there any known way that someone could use your blood to hurt you, on Spinworld?"
"Sort of. People could use it to help them determine whether other biological samples were yours, which could be used to prove you committed a crime. I don't think the usual blood charity does that though."
So it's not entirely riskless; if Ileosa ever shares her blood, it could de-anonymize her if she ever leaves blood at the scene of a crime.
"People do this for free, just to look Good? That's... well, honestly, it's a lot less self-destructive than some of the things people do to look Evil. If everyone else is doing it, I wouldn't stand out as someone who didn't, but if there are other ways I can signal virtue, I'd rather do some of those. So, A or C."
"They try not to let people be too self-destructive about it. They turn people down if they think people don't have enough blood to spare some. You probably wouldn't stand out all that much if you didn't donate."
"You are, allegedly, Chaotic Neutral! Tasha describes this as follows:"
"You and rules don't mesh. Although you understand the need for authority, you avoid authority figures as much as possible. You are most concerned with preserving all aspects of self, and all others take a backseat to your self-preservation game. You're not mean-spirited about your "me" intentions, at all. Only a fellow free spirit can understand how hard you roll for numero uno."
Also, there's a toy car in the room, now. It looks a lot like this toy racecar, but with a colorful scaly print on the body instead of text. There's also some other device with a matching scaly pattern.
CHAOTIC NEUTRAL!?
Ileosa is Lawful Evil! She is! She's as Lawful and as Evil as they come! Well, maybe not literally as Lawful or as Evil as they come, but, she's up there! If Ileosa wasn't Lawful Evil, she'd be a disappointment to her country. She'd be a disappointment to her extended family. She'd be a vindication to her obnoxiously Lawless father, who'd laugh his ass off to see her brought down to his level.
Ileosa detects as Lawful Evil. That doesn't count for everything, but it counts for a lot! And, dispositionally, she's Lawful Evil. She has a Lawful Evil disposition.
Doesn't she?
"I'm totally mean-spirited about my 'me' intentions," Ileosa picks the one thing she can unambiguously protest.
At least the car is cool. It doesn't look like what she was expecting. It's got a glass(?) window. And she can wheel it back and forth from where she's decided to lie down. Ileosa understands how tires work now. She appreciates the spikes on them.
What's the other scaly device?
"For the record, I agree a sensible measure should call you evil-aligned. If you press buttons on that the car will move around without you pushing it."
"Thank you," Ileosa manages. At least the dream person thinks she's Evil. Ileosa hates how her voice sounds right now.
Oh, wow, the remote is really cool! And it doesn't detect as magic!
Ileosa likes her toy car. She hopes she remembers it when she wakes up.
"This model is designed for off-road miniature-car racing, not looking precisely like the big cars people drive. I figured it might be more fun."
"I don't know what the big cars look like, so I can't say. I am pleased with this one, and also pleased to hear that it would win races against vehicles its size."
"Here's a model of a police car that isn't remote controlled and is intended to look more realistic. The paint and the lights on top are special for police but with plain paint and no lights on top it could be a normal car. It's all smooth because that means the air doesn't hinder it as much, so you don't have to burn as much fuel to go at your desired speed."
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