Does it really count as illegal if it's actually perfectly legal for everyone except some relatively less magically powerful people? That doesn't even sound like a law, that sounds like a military dictatorship where the only actual law is that the military leaders get whatever they want.

"Wouldn't it look equally bad for local law enforcement if they couldn't stop the murders but the carnival wasn't getting blamed for them? And didn't it look bad that they needed your help?"

"Blaming the carnival made various tensions in the town worse? So, you probably know about this, there's a thing where humans have these cultural groups that end up a bit genetically isolated and diverge a bit in appearance, and sometimes this is a reason people get mad at each other? The humans in the town were mostly a different group than the humans in the carnival, so when someone the carnival was framed for murder a bunch of the humans in the town got mad at everyone in the same group as the carnival humans, including some people in the town who didn't have anything to do in the carnival. And that's a higher level of chaos than you get from framing someone in the town. And it didn't look bad for the town law enforcement that the carnival was hiring us as investigators, apparently there's a tradition of that some in the area?"

"...Okay. Makes sense. I didn't know about the genetically isolated populations thing, I mean, I look like my parents because they picked out their own appearances based on what they liked the look of and then they picked mine based on what they liked the look of and I haven't changed it too much. But it makes sense that it'd happen that way if nobody did anything about it."

"They're not, like, absolutely isolated, it's more, like, geographic isolation, and you want to have children with people who speak the same language and have the same social scripts as you, things like that. I'm sort of curious how you didn't know about the thing?"

"Because there aren't that many humans and to the extent that humans speak languages besides Hari they're local languages that are mostly spoken by other species, and at any rate we're barely one viable breeding population all together and that's only because of inheritance magic."

"Huh. That's too bad. Well, not the shared language thing, that's fine, but you know what I mean. Anyway, a lot of humans come through Milliways, you could try to pitch them on coming to your world if you want?"

"I guess? I'm not sure I do know what you mean."

"I mean, I'm expressing sympathy about the thing where there aren't many humans, because that sounds sad, but not the thing where they all share a common language, because that seems convenient and not sad."

"I don't understand why there being only a small number of humans would be sad."

"Oh. A lot of people like it when there's lots of people like them and species does affect similarity? Plus if you can barely maintain your population with magic then it suggests it might have been higher in the past, so it might have shrunk, which you might not like."

"I mean, yes, the people who died didn't like that immortality didn't come around in time to save them. Or didn't like that they were executed. Or didn't like that they were enslaved and then at some point got to be more trouble than they were worth and some agerah ate them. But I'm not those people and I don't happen to have any dead friends and if I did it would hardly help anything if there were twelve times as many living humans who weren't my friends."

When a social interaction is a bit awkward, it's time to just make true meta statements!

"Well, some people aren't partial to their species, it sounds like I made an incorrect assumption."

The obvious implication is that some people are. She's not sure what to do with that.

"Anyway, you were telling me stories?"

"Yes! So, after we uncovered the crime ring, someone from the carnival liked our work, and she said her friend who worked for the government in a town downriver would appreciate having some adventurers look into local problems, specifically that a bunch of apprentices, uh, near-adulthood children being trained in specialized work, had gone missing. And when we arrived, it turned out that there were these giant evil, uh, in this case meaning hostile to everyone far beyond the point of self-interest, insects causing problems in the city also, and this apple orchard everyone was kind of unable to engage with the existence of. Long story short, there was this poison called 'demon's bile' that made people evil and insane and turned normal bugs into giant evil bugs, and someone who worked for Lamashtu, the god of miscarriages-and-birth-defects-and-such, was leading a plot to poison the whole town with it. But also some devils, uh, creature made out of sane organized tyrannical evil who work for Asmodeus, the god of tyranny and contracts and slavery and such, had hijacked the town's legal code to secretly give them ownership over the souls of everyone in the town when they died and some other abilities to manipulate people in the town. Which is why they were all ignoring the orchard and some other things, the idea behind the orchard was that people in the town could come pick free apples and that seemed too nice. Anyway, we cleaned up the bile and got the ringleader of the poisoning-the-town plot imprisoned and got the kidnapped people back and cured, and we were able to get some of the people the ringleader was controlling to work for the Celestials instead and the others sent to jail in the town too, with the idea being that if we stopped them from working for the ringleader and had their friends talk to them and stuff then they'd be able to live peacefully with others. And various things had gone wrong for the soul-stealing devils, so the souls were still around and we got them back to send to the Celestials instead of Asmodeus, and we also destroyed their means of hijacking the town charter."

"That is a lot of mind-altering effects, I'd ask if you're selling wards but whatever your state of the art is clearly isn't good enough. And the - sadistic but not criminal people - enslaved an entire town, which is somehow not criminal of them - what the fuck was wrong with their town charter, was it written while mind-controlled by the sadistic non-criminals?"

"So, their town charter had all these fancy precedence rules, and very clear details about what the actual town charter is if the document gets damaged and how precedence rules work, and it turned out that literally the entire town charter they had on hand was by its own definitions just a portion of a larger document, stored nearbyish, on which Aszy-knows-what was written. And this started with … some people who had made an agreement with the devils had set up the town this way, and when the town rebelled against them they didn't throw out the entire legal system, just removed a bunch of privileges those people had given themselves? And this kind of thing isn't illegal because, approximately, the laws that Asmodeus holds himself to are a negotiated agreement of the gods and such, and a lot of the gods are Evil and so wouldn't agree to laws banning them from having their servants do things like that. It would have been illegal by, like, mortal law though."

"And I can't sell you high-quality persistent wards, sorry. This sort of thing would be well against my area of expertise."

"What does 'mortal law' mean?"

"So, the gods all have their agreements, but they agreed to be far away from the world, and thus they don't just run polities themselves. But people still tend to form polities, where they form agreements about who owns what and when they will and won't punish people who kill other people and such, and when that gets codified it's what I was calling mortal law. The way this works is … inheritance magic doesn't sound amazing for successfully killing a bunch of guards and fleeing a city, and you don't look like a mage, so if you went somewhere and went to a shop and just grabbed things some local armed people would probably try to stop you. They'd possibly even try to stop you if, say, you bought land right next to someone's house and played loud music every night for weeks. Now, me, I could actually cause serious problems for a smaller government, so if I go around breaking major laws, they'd still arrest me, but if I stole a fruit from a fruit stand, or made a nuisance of myself, they'd probably try to settle the matter with me quietly because they wouldn't want the costs of fighting me over something trivial like that?"

"And sometimes I run into people who say things like 'I'm a prince, and I say that I'm taking over this person's house now, it's mine and she has to leave, and I'll have you executed if you insult me, and, uh, I just can't point to my kingdom because I'm lost'. And I don't respect that at all, not just because I can tell they're lying, but also because any kingdom that lost track of their prince and can't afford to scry him can't actually project power outside their borders, much less enough to execute me. And thus, even if such a kingdom did exist, it'd be ridiculous for me to treat things their prince says as law I have to follow."

"And when you're, say, Aszy … mortal governments' laws look like that to you. Sure, they all agreed to put some words on a piece of paper saying 'no kidnapping and torturing our citizens', but why would that make it be Law over Aszy? I mean, sometimes the servants of Lawful gods will also follow local law, but it's more … a convenience and a courtesy, for them."

"So it's like... we have imperial laws and then the states can do what they want as long as it doesn't get in the way of imperial law. Sort of. Except that you don't have a nice legible government, you just have a bunch of people at war who are - legible and lawful toward each other, but not toward you. Is that right?"

"Sort of? There are pro-legibility and anti-legibility contingents among the gods-and-similar, and same for niceness. And the anti-legibility gods will often push the limits. Asmodeus actually does absolutely keep to his promises and enforces the same among his servants when they represent him, but Charon, the god of Death, breaks a bunch of laws, covers it up, and then gets sanctions imposed on him when he gets caught. Most notably, he literally brought a kill-everyone-in-a-certain-radius machine, the Dustbringer, to the Material and did escalating tests with it that wiped out an entire empire, and that was very illegal and lifespans were allowed to be higher after that. Anyway, if it were just Heaven, Asmodeus, and Axis around, or any subset of those, they probably would enforce legible law on everyone, but the gods-and-such include groups that are actively in favor of and tied to confusion and chaos and would be weaker in its absence. Archons, who work for Heaven, and Inevitables and Axiomites, who work for Axis, are reliably legible and lawful towards me and would be the same towards you, and I think devils are too? It's just that if they're not constrained, the way devils tend to be lawful is by making incredibly manipulative deals that technically don't break their word, telling people if they surrender immediately they'll be tortured less, et cetera."

"Your world sounds terrible."

"It is. I do in fact have good reasons for staying in here until I'm powerful enough to fix it."

"Sounds like it, yeah. And you're just - you just have more time and no taxes and the chance to trade with aliens and you figure that'll be enough?"

"Not just 'more time'. As much time as I need. I got the curse that causes my soul to age removed by a particularly talented infirmary worker, and with that fixed, repairing my body is much easier. Furthermore, infirmary shifts include payment intended to cover food, in addition to a room here, but I don't need to eat nor do I want to do it every day. It really seems like it's got to be enough? I've been doing extensive magic research on my own capabilities without interruption, too."

"Do you think I could stop aging too?"