"In Absalom? I haven't made any friends in Absalom but my mom does it all the time, like the gnome you met. I think she mostly asks people about whatever they seem like they'd be good at talking about and is enthusiastic to learn more."

"Is there a safe way to act enthusiastic around here without acting like a gnome?"

"I think there is a reserved-and-stoic to gnome spectrum and you should find a place on that spectrum that works for you and does not require being all the way on the gnome extreme. Or choose a method unlike my mom's. My friend-making strategy is to rotate between nonce adventuring parties till I clicked with one."

"It's hard because... I think people are scared of me when they don't pity me. Or even when they do. A little just because I'm from Nidal." He swallows. His voice is quiet, but not in a furtive way. In a miserable way. "It gets worse if they think I don't hate every single thing I was ever taught, but - even if I did, it's hard to ask questions without comparisons."

"Yeah... I've gotten some mileage out of being willing to denounce a lot of prominent drow cultural features and if you don't have anything like that to make it look... more complicated than 'with us or against us'... then you're going to be operating in a very weird social niche."

"I don't even know what they want me to denounce besides 'all of Nidal' or 'the Midnight Lord'. I... think worshiping the Dreamer is fine and should be legal? There are probably lots of other things but I don't know what they are. I think Pangolais is a nest of vipers but I just think that because people've told me so. I got the impression Nisroch might be the grimmest part of the country and the part with the most foreigners? I don't know if I can say that in a way that's helpful instead of just defensive, though."

"Denouncing the Midnight Lord would certainly help a hell of a lot. The central thing people are thinking of when they imagine Nidal, or Kuthites in general, is... not people steering for pain they happen to like all right. A lot of people have not cultivated any pains of that form, are not aware that's a thing, and would not be interested in picking up a taste for it even if they learned that it's been done. They're thinking about forcibly applied pain presaged by either ambush or dread, and they are very, very strongly associating that pain with suffering. I know two languages that don't have separate words for the two concepts at all and I'd have to say something really convoluted like 'bodily sensations with the character shared by slashing and burning, of any or no particular emotional correlate' to express the distinction. Or I was taught inadequate vocabulary, which is always possible, but it's hardly impossible in principle for a language to conflate them, just like Minkaian has one word that means everything from the hip down and not a separate one for just the foot."

"I know the thing you mean. I - wish it didn't happen so much, and honestly I wish I could do something to make it happen less but - I mean, there's nothing I can do if people aren't interested in being less, um, sensitive, and I can't just keep people from ever experiencing pain they don't like - even if that were at all remotely possible, which it really isn't, I don't get to choose not to serve the Midnight Lord." His voice is more petulant than bitter. He hunches over. He clasps his hands very tightly.

"Don't you?"

He hunches over more. "I mean, I could? But I owe him. I can't actually pay back all of the gifts I've accepted from the Midnight Lord and Nidal, I literally can't afford to pay back - I mean - humans are old enough to understand and make choices about debts when we're, like, eight, and that's about a decade of - everything I ate and everything I wore and everything I used and every hour anyone spent teaching me anything - I can't pay that back. I guess I could borrow a lot of money if I wanted Abadar to own me instead. Or if I were an adventurer, maybe I'd make enough that way."

"Abadar doesn't buy souls. Devils will, though I don't recommend that. Zon-Kuthon personally put food on your table and spun all your yarn?"

"Made it possible for plants to grow there. Kept my ancestors alive, so everyone who did spin yarn was indebted to someone who was indebted to someone who blah blah blah. I knew what I was getting into, I was warned and absolutely nobody stopped me from just starving myself to death."

"You could construe yourself as indebted to Gozreh for supplying air."

"Nobody ever warned me that Gozreh would be demanding repayment and even if they did, if I tried to stop breathing I'd just start again. It wouldn't be fair."

"And the alternative to eternal servitude to Zon-Kuthon is definitely starving to death, and not leaving? I'd actually feel very differently about this if a lot of eight year olds were offered the chance to get on a boat and go to a faraway land where there are games that don't hurt."

"I guess if I'd tried to walk to Nisroch it's not impossible I would have made it alive? And then it's not impossible I could have gotten on a ship? I could have tried to make it over the mountains but that seems even less likely to work. It wouldn't have been illegal to or anything, though. I don't think I would've been very likely to make it."

"...would it be illegal for foreign parties to establish routes within Nidal that people could use to leave? I had always had the impression that coyote operations to get people out were on the downlow out of necessity and not because they were avoiding some relatively trivial hurdle like needing to bring their own food or something."

Varan laughs. It is simultaneously a genuinely amused laugh and a very unamused one.

"I think it's legal to hunt them for sport and obviously if you can maledict meddling foreigners to Xovaikain you're allowed. Uh, I think that's one of the things that confuses foreigners? There are a lot of totally legal things you can do that make it totally legal to torture you to death."

"Are there conditions under which it is not legal in Nidal to torture you to death?"

"Yeah, absolutely. It's not legal to torture ambassadors all the way to death unless it's an accident and you raise them, for instance. It's not always okay to hunt foreigners for sport. - And there plenty of times it's illegal to torture natives to death."

"...gotcha. I am struggling to come up with an analogy illustrating what's despicable about this arrangement that is neither condescending nor abstruse but I'll mull on it, I suppose."

"I can try not to get mad about being condescended to. Honestly, the more I explain it the more I wish it were different."

"If you already wish it were different the analogy may be unnecessary! Let me just make sure I understand all the - steps, here? So we're in agreement that after Earthfall, some people who lived in the area that is now Nidal made a deal with Zon-Kuthon that they'd be able to grow food there in exchange for the eternal service of all of their descendants, I think that's relatively uncontested history, yes?"

"That’s not a completely horrible summary."

"Whereupon they formed Nidal, and orchestrated its culture and way of life to involve an exceptionally high concentration of pain, without particular regard for whether anybody involved liked it, though by apparent happy accident some of them do some of the time?"