As promised, Andoran is a city of tall columns and high cupolas, strange smells and stranger races; and as promised there is a pack of dirty children in often-patched clothes, aged between about seven and about eighteen, as soon as the ship lands. The captain seems to know them and disembarks to have a discussion. 

Diena and Aspex rather gawk. In Lastwall orphaned children are nearly always taken in by family, and in the cases where they have no family are taken in by the church and taught everything a person ought to know and often chosen for the service of the goddess. 

But in Andoran, all good things were shattered by Hell, in their Evil plans, and there are too many children for the church to take in, and so - of course they would end up running around like wild animals, and probably fighting with the wild animals for their food, too. 

"I don't expect our children we're meant to find are almost grown already," says Aspex. "As we've only been married six years."

        Diena puzzles over that until it makes even less sense than it started out making, and then abandons it. "Heaven's works are mysterious."

"I suppose. Well, then it's better to have older children, probably, since they can work; and we can't have babies, as you can't nurse them."

       "Maybe we can get a mix."

The discussion concludes. The captain hands some money to one of the oldest children, and the children begin to unload the ship. 

The group has clearly done this a lot and divides up the work easily and without much discussion. The younger children carry very small loads; they're very clearly being given a task that they're less efficient at than adults in order to teach them how to do the work. 

That seems like an entirely sensible form of social organization and how things work even if children have parents! And it's a good sign about the children not in fact having zero knowledge of any virtues, which is good because having zero knowledge of any virtues is less problematic in a baby than a child.

"Are the smaller children in the orphanages?" Aspex asks the captain.

"Well, they'd all be at orphanages, wouldn't they?" the captain says. "A baby can't unload a ship."

" - so these children also live at the orphanage, but come down to the docks in the day to learn to work?" 

The captain says, "Nah, Eward"-- he gestures towards the youth whom most of the discussion had been with and who had been paid-- "wouldn't put up with that. The kids stay at his house unless they have another place to be. A good reliable young man. I keep telling him that if he wants to see the world there's a berth on my ship, and he says 'but who would take care of the littles?' and I do not have an answer."

"Well, we could take some of them," says Diena dubiously. "Not more than four I don't think."

"We could probably take five or six if one of the older ones was a responsible girl," says Aspex. "But if these children have a brother looking after them already then there might be children who don't and those need parents more."

"Eward is responsible," the captain says. "Makes sure the kids are fed, takes them to get a channel if they're sick, teaches them about Cayden and Shelyn and Erastil. You never see him in a bar while the kids don't have shoes. A lot of parents could learn a lesson from that boy, I say."

"...do most parents not do those things?" Aspex asks incredulously. Those are in fact all good things to do but they're very basic things to do, like saying someone is a good farmer because he milks his cows and takes them to pasture.

"Well, most parents do," the captain says judiciously. "But some parents, they just don't realize this isn't Cheliax anymore. Kids go out to play with their backs torn to ribbons. Makes you wonder if they want a Calistria cleric in the family."

Aspex does not know anything about Calistria. He looks at Diene, who has a brother who is educated. 

Diene knows Calistria is the goddess of whores but can't quite piece together the connection between beating your children bloody and whores, except that both are Evil. "It is very terrible what Hell did," she offers after a moment. "Where are the orphanages?"

The captain considers this. "I knew a woman who left hers at the church of Desna's?"

"Well, all right, where's that?"

As it happens, the captain does not remember where the Desnan orphanage is.

He does remember where the grove is, outside of Andoran, where you are most likely to find a cleric of Desna, should there be one who is visiting the city and who feels like they want to be near the grove. Probably there will be someone there who knows how to find the orphanage. 

Maybe they'll instead look for the church of Iomedae. The Church of Iomedae is more reasonable and does not run off things like 'should the cleric feel like they want to be near the grove'. A priest should be findable so that people can get healing if they need it. 

The captain knows exactly where the Church of Iomedae is. It's that-a-way. Very large. You can't miss it. 

See, vastly more reasonable than 'in a grove somewhere'. They are glad that reason still governs in these foreign lands. They'll head straight for it.

At a certain age, parents tend to shoo their children outside during the day, so they are not underfoot and disrupting other people's work. In Vellumis, children formed packs, playing tag and jumpsies, hand-clapping games and tip-cat, and so they did in Andoran.

In Andoran, there are somewhat more children on the streets, but it's nothing that couldn't be parents having particularly large families, until you looked closely. Many of the children in Andoran look too-thin, like a child six months after the crops failed. Some children's clothes are falling apart, and some of the children are naked, though they are old enough that their parents ought to have given them clothes however poor they are. And, in Vellumis, even if a family couldn't feed their children enough, they would wash their children's hands and face, and cut their hair, and make them look as presentable as they could. Even if you were poor, you could be respectable. But some of these children have ground-in grime like they'd never been bathed even on holy days, and hair that is wild and tangled like a savage's.

And every few streets, there is a beggar-child or two or three on the corner, asking passerby for coins. Most people don't even acknowledge the beggars as they walk past, but a few drop coins in front of them. 

Diene stops in front of the first beggar-child she sees. "Do you have parents?" she asks.

Both Lastwall and Andoran technically speak Taldane, and in practice people can usually make themselves understood to one another with effort, but she's very obviously foreign.

"No," the beggar-child says with a professionally pitiful expression. "I never had none, ma'am."

"That's terrible! Well, we haven't any children, and want some, and will take good care of them and feed them and Aspex's father has some land, would you like to come home with us and be our child?"

Aspex looks slightly alarmed at the decisiveness here, but nods.

... ... ...

The child stands up and tries to run away. 

- well they're obviously not going to stop the child running away!

They look at each other, bewildered.

      "Maybe he thought you were a faery in disguise or something," says Aspex. "It's not a good idea to trust strangers promising nice things."

"I suppose not."

The child, who has a firm yet vague understanding about Bad People who promise you food and then do Unspecified Bad Things that his older sister had declined to describe in much detail, notices two blocks away that the Bad People have not followed him, and then decides he can probably sell his parents on "I had to stop begging because Bad People were there" so he can take the rest of the day off and play hopscotch. 

And so they can continue to the church of Iomedae.

The temple in their own village is to all of the gods people have reason to worship - Iomedae and Erastil and Jaidi and Abadar and Desna and Pharasma and Gozreh. Iomedae is the goddess who made Lastwall and made its lands fertile and its forests safe and its government just and noble and its people the bravest and most decent in the world, but it'd be silly to worship only one god just because She's the best one. To Her church is where you'd go in a bigger place where the churches work separately, though.

They enter, only gaping a little because there was also a big lovely temple to Iomedae in Vellumis when they passed through it. 

Everyone in the temple of Iomedae knows where they're going: a warrior heads to the training yard, a messenger-boy carries a note from the treasurer to a local manager about an unexpectedly large donation of gold, a cleric goes to the temple of Sarenrae for a meeting. 

Except Diena and Aspex, who clearly have no idea where they're going at all, and who come to the attention of the guard-clerk whose job is to track such things. She's a good enough fighter to dissuade the usual attempts at theft and to call for backup if something serious happens, but it hardly ever comes up; mostly her job is making sure that everyone is routed to the appropriate person.

"Can I help you?"

"- probably!" says Aspex. "We heard that in Andoran there are lots of abandoned children because of the evils of Hell, and we are looking for three or four of them, as we haven't had any luck having our own. Do you know where the orphanages are?"

"We don't run an orphanage ourselves, just a creche for Iomedaean adventurers," says the guard-clerk, who has explained this a lot but mostly to people looking for orphanages for the opposite reason. "Most orphanages are run by the church of Sarenrae, but the churches of Shelyn, Desna, Jaidi, Reymenda, and Pharasma all run major orphanages. Unfortunately, there's no central record of non-church-affiliated orphanages."

"All right, which of those is nearest here?"

There are orphanages of Shelyn and Desna about equally far away. 

"- and which one would you recommend, then?"

"They both are into educational experiments? Desna's involve a lot of time spent outside, Shelyn's involve a lot of art. The Shelynite orphanage's children's choir does a lot of performances to raise money. Good singers."

They look at each other dubiously. "Time spent outside is probably more relevant," Aspex says.

"I think so."

"Which way to the one of Desna's, then?"

There are directions! The guard has spoken to people who aren't from Absalom often enough that the directions are even useful.

Then after only getting a little bit lost and quickly tracing their steps back, they'll find their way to the temple of Desna. Desna seems like an odd god to run an orphanage but whatever suffices, they suppose. They go on in. 

No one notices them come in because the front room of the orphanage is absolute chaos, or rather Chaos. 

There are about twenty children, aged between four and seven, taking off boots and coats and playing with each other. An adult and three teenage girls are supervising-- helping a younger child with their shoes while simultaneously comforting a crying child and yelling "Jonneth! no hitting!" at other children. Most of the children are holding flowers or bits of wood or interesting rocks or in one case a bug. 

A small child with a flower who has already taken off her shoes observes the existence of new adults. "Hello! I have a flower."

"Hello," Diena says, as unperturbed as she can manage. Of course it takes lots of effort to raise children to be disciplined and respectful, they certainly don't start out that way. "Where did you get the flower?"

"It's called pineapple weed! It is good for calming anxiety and pain relief and healthy sleep and also it can turn you into a dragon."

"That seems very unlikely," says Aspex.

Diena glares at him. "Well, that's terribly useful! Does the church grow them?"

"The littles go out into the woods. Every day except Sunday and Toilday! I am in Morning Group which is the best group but we don't always go out in the morning, on Moondays we get to go out in the morning and at night and then we sleep in on Toildays and we don't go out at all. We learn about birds and herbs and worms and bees and the weather and we climb trees and boulders and play tag. And on Oathdays we go SWIMMING."

"- and do you learn how to cook, and sew clothes, and take care of animals?" asks Diena dubiously. This does not sound miserable but it also does not sound like it prepares little girls to be bigger girls.

"We cook and sew in the afternoons but I don't like that," the girl says. "And we take care of animals while we are in the woods!"

"Well, why don't you like cooking and sewing? They make useful things. ...is it because you do not have a family to be happy when the things you make are useful?" Diena hadn't thought about it but she can see how labor would seem pointless if it wasn't for the benefit of your family, for example because you didn't have one. It's an upsetting thought.

"They're boring. And sewing makes my fingers hurt. And I don't need to sew anyway. I am going to grow up to be a wizard and a cleric of Desna and a miller and a carpenter and an oatmonger and a taverner."

Enough children have had their shoes removed that the teacher looks up and notices someone is there. "Hello! Are you thinking of dropping off a child?"

"- no," Aspex says, after a minute of being startled. "We heard that Andoran has too many children without anyone to take care of and so we mean to take some home and raise them."

The teacher blinks for a moment and says, "I'm going to need to speak to you two privately. Rhea, Lyndelle, can you handle get the children lunch? I know you haven't done lunch duty before--"

The slightly taller girl, who seems to be named Rhea, says, "I've helped Nela loads of times, I can do it."

"Good," the teacher says. "Remember, they have to finish--"

"Their first serving before they can have their second one, and if Mayv spills her food all over the floor it's because she has clumsy hands so she should get more, and Luan and Henren can't sit together because they fight, Emmeline, I know, we'll do fine."

"Good. I'm proud of you girls."

Diene is proud of them too! She smiles at them. They'll go with the teacher. 

Aspex is not sure this is what he was expecting, but he doesn't know how to say what he was expecting. Anyway the church of Iomedae sent them here, which means that it's fine. 

Emmeline takes them aside to her private office. The piles of paper resemble nothing so much as a glacier: slowly moving, immensely old, and prone to dramatic collapses at inopportune moments. Clerics of Desna, even if they're only first-circle, are not known for their paperwork filing abilities.

"You seem odd, so I'm going to give you a chance. Tell me why I should not respond to you with 'get the fuck out of my orphanage, slavers.'"

- Aspex and Diene both look frankly entirely baffled. When this is the case Aspex is the one who talks, so Diene looks to him hopefully.

" - well, probably because we're...not ....slavers?" he says, after a moment. "...are there a lot of slavers coming around trying to steal the children? That's horrendous."

      "That's probably why that beggar child ran away," says Diene, in the voice of one having an important realization.

"Oh, yes, probably. But anyway, we're from Sonders Vale, it's only two weeks on foot from Vellumis, in Lastwall, and my father has a farm."

      "And we could take care of children but Heaven hasn't given us any," says Diene. 

"If someone wants children that aren't related to them," Emmeline says, "it's usually not out of the kindness of their hearts. It's usually because they want servants or farmhands, and feel that the wages for an actual employee are too high. --In the good scenario, some people are just cruel and want something they can hurt that won't fight back."

"Well they say the forces of Evil have done terrible things here," Aspex says. "I'm sure we're not properly understanding how that changed things. But it's really just that here we are without children, and a travelling preacher came and said in Andoran there were children without parents, going hungry or living as thieves, so we figured we ought to go and get some of them. They won't work any more than their cousins, and my Deina'll be a good mother."

"--well, the children at my orphanage in fact have parents."

"Oh," says Aspex. "Maybe I'm not understanding what an orphanage is."

"If you had children, and the crops failed, and you couldn't feed them, but you could send them to live with relatives somewhere else where there was enough food, would you stop loving them? Would you be indifferent to whether you got to visit them, or ever see them again?"

"Well, I wouldn't expect to," says Aspex, "If I had to give up my children because I wasn't responsible enough to raise them I'd want them to have good replacement parents."

"...you either don't have children," Emmeline says, "or you're Cheliaxian and doing a remarkably poor job of hiding it. For future reference, you can't just replace 'pathetic and weak' with 'irresponsible' and get Lawful Good."

“… we told you already that we don’t have children,” says Aspex, offended even though technically there is nothing offensive about saying that one has either been telling the truth or is a servant of Hell, in a place where liars probably are servants of Hell. “If we had children, then it wouldn’t make any sense to try to get children.”

”Are you saying that people here who have children they can’t take care of do not want the children to be adopted by people who can take care of them?” says Diena, who really does not want to get distracted from this into talking about anything at all that is not this.

"When a woman is pregnant with a child," Emmeline says, "she almost always loves that child more than moon or sun or stars. She doesn't stop loving them because she is poor or unmarried or has a husband who beats her and the children, that's-- not how love works. Killing your child is an act of desperation, or it is caused by Cheliax trying to stamp out all love as weakness. And when you love a child, you want to help take care of them, you want to spend time with them, you want to be able to check that they're all right. --Most children at the orphanage have parents that pay the orphanage to take care of them. Often both parents."

"Are there," says Aspex, "children in Andoran who have no parents, or only children whose parents pay the churches to raise them."

Emmeline looks very pained. "Yes. Some here, even, though there's never enough space."

"Well, then, I think it makes sense for us to take children who don't have any parents, and not the children who do have parents who aren't raising them, as the ones who don't have parents are in worse straits, probably."

"I'm still not convinced that you're not... worse... than the other options."

"This is a very nice place for an orphanage in a country that Hell marred," Diena says. "But children need parents, not just a priest keeping them fed and out of trouble. They need to have clean clothes in their size and be taught their prayers and have someone to hold them all night when they're sick and get everyone together to build them a house when they're older."