"They’ve all got seats. There’s a coalition of Peace and Freedom and Purity and Uprightness and Labor that has a majority but just barely."

"And you don't get a lot of, like, the Islamic party winning big and making everybody wear headscarves?"

"Uh, they mostly want people to stop charging interest and increase taxes to fund more public education, I don't remember hearing about modesty from them lately. We don't get a lot of one party winning big and changing everything anyway."

"What's the job market like for people who died aged seventeen?"

"I don't really see why 'seventeen' is the category you're looking at - oh, because you were expecting college. If you've got most of an American high school education you can become an omniglot for free and then see if you can get work teaching people to read, or you can study a bit and do my job, or you can see about being a janitor or something for a while, there's always a market for those. If you wanted to go to college, we don't cover things in exactly the same order so there's not a specific category of program that'll fit that exact slot but you can probably find four years worth of classes at the right level for you for free."

"And I guess 'for free' is the thing rather than 'with a stipend' because I don't need to eat or anything? Does not eating do anything?"

"It makes you hungry. You'd know better than me what being hungry is like for you. You just get hungry and don't stop being hungry until you eat."

"Does it... stop getting worse at any point in there, or do you just get hungrier and hungrier forever?"

"Yeah, it basically stops - you don't really get more starving forever but you can get more annoyed about it, but just, like, emotionally, if you run out of patience. I suggest you also look for a community kitchen if you know how to cook, or try asking the Society for the Advancement of Human Potential for a grant. You just tell them when you died and what you did with your life and what you think you'd do differently if you had two thousand mira, and 'I really want to become highly educated and gain magic and work on saving people from bad afterlives and would be able to focus better if I could eat, I just died and obviously couldn't have planned for this or saved up' will go over pretty well."

"Huh, okay. I do know how to cook, though I'm not, like, great at it."

"I would also encourage you to make time to sleep if you're going to study. You don't have to do that either but it helps a lot."

"Does it keep helping right up to the point of sleeping a full eight hours every night, because that's just so much time and it would be disappointing if I couldn't cut it down."

"For a student, yeah. If you're doing something repetitive that's not about sort of - learning things or being clever, it's not important, take stims and stay up for a month straight if you want to spend that long playing Tetris or mopping floors."

"Ew. - you have Tetris here? Is it an import or did someone just clone it?"

"I dunno, I assume the second? Probably a physical copy of it wasn't worth including in anyone's backpack on a media run and we've got some real computer whizzes down here."

"Cool... can you quantify for me the risk of being kidnapped by demons?"

"Uh, maybe about one in a billion per person per year here, almost all people who were traveling in areas that aren't guarded against incoming teleportation, but it might be higher because people who do that kind of thing are also systematically less likely to be missed quickly if they disappear so if we're really pessimistic it's maybe like one in a hundred million per person per year."

"And those areas are presumably not where they build the schools and the community kitchens."

"Yeah, absolutely not. This area isn't safe, obviously, anyone can show up here."

"...great. Uh, can I apply to move to one of the others later once I know more or is my decision upon dying pretty permanent?"

"It’s not permanent but travel is expensive. For maximum option value I'd go to New Jerusalem for now and you can still apply to live here later but you could also live here and then leave if you want."

"Why is that maximum option value, does going to New Jerusalem now get subsidies that going later doesn't?"

"Yeah, it'll still be subsidized later but there are a few programs that skip out on worrying about incentives by just helping people who died in the last month or so."

"Worrying about incentives like people using it to pop back and forth on vacation?"

"Yeah, or if help is means-tested are we discouraging getting a job, or are we helping people avoid the consequences of their own bad planning, or whatever."