"- so in general there are - two sets of norms for a society? One is that you heavily discourage premarital sex, and don't permit divorce except under exceptional circumstances, and expect everyone to follow a lot of rules, about their conduct, and to take their obligations very seriously, and then their lives will be hard and maybe short on freedom and poetry and romance but all children will be born to a mother who can take care of them and a father who can provide for them and almost everybody will make Axis. And in Axis no one can get pregnant and there are accordingly no restrictions it'd be sensible to impose on people, on the basis of the form they've carried over from their past life, and they can have all the poetry in the world, then. 

And the other possible set of norms is that you sort of gently discourage premarital sex but not enough that the more irresponsible half of people don't do it anyway, and they get pregnant with children they're not prepared to take care of, and kill them and go to Hell for it or do their best with them and raise them in desperate poverty, and no one takes marriage all that seriously so half the time even if a woman does wait she ends up with a man who walks out, a few years down the line, if he feels like it, and it's rare to make Axis. 

It's not impossible to do anything in between but I think it might be impossible to sit patiently somewhere in between. Walls that you don't reinforce erode and there are a lot of complicated social expectations holding up all the walls in a place like this.

And in general I think there's - a lot of room for women's liberation efforts within Osirion's set of norms. More support for widows, better guidance for men about how to be good husbands, better healing for childbirth, more women's religious groups, more theology on the role of women - those all seem like good things to me. But - but when this topic comes up often it comes up with people who just think we should be like Avistan and I mostly do not think we should."

Vanyel nods, slowly. 

"I mean, Avistan doesn't sound great either, although I'm aware that what I'm hearing is filtered through several translations. But - well, it makes sense that in places with different conditions, and different laws of nature even, how it makes sense to set up your society will be different too. It does seem like..." 

(His mind is drifting in the direction of 'it kind of seems like the gods' fault' but that's the sort of thought that makes Yfandes go all weird and cagey, and he really cannot handle that right now.) 

"Nevermind. Mahdi, sorry, what did you find down there?" 

"They've got some kind of elaborate tunnel system. It must've transported the water when the city had it. Most of the stuff I encountered near it is full of sand and nothing much useful but a while back there's a section of tunnels that's clear of sand, I could drop us down there to explore if we want."

"Oh! Yes, that seems like an excellent start. And I might be able to help clear out more tunnel once we get there. Also I can give us lighting and such." 

"All right." He reaches out to take everyone's hands, and then does a Dimension Door down to the clear area of tunnels.

(What does this look like to mage-sight? Vanyel is, as usual, very curious about everything that could maybe replicate Gates.) 

Dimension Door is just a lower-circle, shorter-range, Teleport, and looks the same to mage-sight except that it uses a lot less energy.

Neat.

Vanyel can give them a nice bright mage-light in the tunnel, it doesn't take much power and he's not sure what their lighting spell situation is. 

They can also do light pretty cheaply but he can have more control over what his light is doing once it's up.

And they can explore the abandoned city. Hagan's snake Fy is useful for this; he can fit into much smaller spaces than them and indicate if they're worth clearing of sand. Hagan himself seems kind of sulky.

Vanyel's magic is really good for blasting sand out of tunnels with combinations of wind-spells and just shoving it (while keeping a bubble around them so they don't have to be sandblasted). He also discoverers that his paving-roads technique works to compress the sand into neat blocks, which take up less space and can be picked up and moved to one side.)

:Is something wrong?: he eventually asks Hagan in Mindspeech. 

Then they can get into some buried buildings! It looks like most easily-accessible valuables were taken when the city's residents had to flee in a hurry but there are lots of things that'd be harder to move, some of them of significant historical value; tile mosaics and statues and chests of clothes mostly disintegrated by great age and cellars of wine which has probably been aged for longer than advised, at this point, though Fazil declares that the bottles aren't showing up to Detect Poison "more than wine usually does."

Hagan startles just slightly at being Mindspoken. :I don't like the way Osirion is: he says shortly. :Never found any place that's better, but.:

:I'm sorry. I don't like it either, and - my world does have places that are better, in some ways. Maybe nowhere that's better for every person, equally - I know there are still kids starving in Valdemar... And I don't want to stomp around too much in a world where I have no context. Still. Don't like it: 

:Where do the starving kids go, when they die?:

:We don't know as much as you do about what happens to people after they die. But - I'm not sure they go anywhere, not as...whole people, who keep having experiences: 

(He really really really doesn't want to think any harder about the source of this guess.) 

Nod. 

They explore. They find a bathhouse with lewd tile mosaics on the walls and several hundred gold under the floor, an armory whose mundane weapons and armor are all hopelessly tarnished and crumbled but which has some magical weapons in them, totally intact - "magic weapons don't rust," Mahdi explains, as if this is an obvious fact about the universe, and puts them in his bag -

- a door that is really conspicuously magicked shut, there are at least eight different spells on this door -

Vanyel gives it a dubious look. "Er, I can have a go at disabling the spells, but I sort of want to know what's inside the room that someone wanted to put this many protections on. I can try to scope it out with mage-sight?" 

"That seems like a good idea."

So Vanyel tests if he can reach his mage-sight into the room. 

He can do that! The room looks elaborate. It is not full of sand. It has some magical construct guards with spears.

He passes this on to the others. 

Are the magical construct guards still active or functional? 

The spells do not look broken.

"Ooooooh, maybe we found the palace."

"Oh! That would make sense. Er, there are some guard spells in there - I don't think they're sapient, or will explode if I disable them? I can also peek with Farsight to get us a visual."  

"I'd assume they're constructs, which won't be people, yeah. Intelligent constructs are amazingly difficult and were invented three hundred years ago, more recent than this place is - I mean, Azlantl had them, but -"