There's a little old gnome lady, who approached Varan purely because she didn't recognize his accent, and tied him up in conversation for fully half an hour before ultimately recommending her next door neighbor's adventurer daughter as an "interestingly lucid perspective on things that are understood too implicitly by most" and has announced that he will be expected to join this young lady for dinner at sunset at the Galtan-style café the next day.
"Uh, the suffering is bad, supporting a deity who promulgates suffering - I understand the orthodoxy is that the suffering is incidental to the pain but things would look very different if he strongly preferred the one without the other when by default they mostly come together, and if he were even really interested in getting more pain and less suffering I bet the other gods would foot some of the divine bill - anyway supporting said deity is bad... whereas good things about Nidal are going to be the, like, little micro-scale mortal graces, people who like each other and like parts of their lives such as... rain, and breakfast, and pleasant dreams, all those things that are enjoyable and ineradicable; and also political stability, that's good and maybe tends to be underweighted by everyone except Abadarans."
"...So Iomedae likes good things and hates bad things and just wants to wipe us all out because - is it because she wants to make sure we don't conquer Nirmathas and then go after Lastwall or is it because of the handful of cowards who are afraid of Xovaikain even in Nidal?"
"- I'm not sure I understand most of that question but I wouldn't have rated Nidal highly on political stability if I thought it was going to conquer Nirmathas!"
"I don't think Nidal's going to conquer anywhere this millennium, yeah. So it's the cowards, then. The people who are so afraid of Xovaikain that they wish they'd never been born. Iomedae wants to kill my little sister and my aunt - Iomedae wishes I had never been born, never gotten to see a single festival or read a single poem or anything ever, just because some pathetic people wish they'd never been born, even though those people already had their chance to starve themselves when they were young enough to go to the Boneyard? Is that right?"
"- Iomedae probably wishes you'd never been born, yeah, and more importantly wishes that none of the babies who will be born in Nidal next year were going to be born. If Nidal didn't have the place somebody else would move there, you realize? It's probably perfectly arable by conventional methods if you get Zon-Kuthon out of the weather. This isn't a generic project to prevent poetry-enjoyers from existing."
"Does that matter to her? I haven't heard it said that she's only the goddess of destroying Evil that someone else wants to steal land from."
"I mean, not necessarily, but - I realize now I'm assuming it would be too insane for anybody to believe this and maybe I shouldn't assume that, do you think that everybody should be going around having as many children as they imagine they could see to age eight or something at all times? Lest a poetry-appreciation opportunity go unhad?"
"I mean, the government is better positioned to tell you how many kids you should expect to be able to take care of, they know how many the rest of the country had in the last few years. And the number of kids the whole country can take care of is a lot smaller than what you'd get if everyone had as many kids as possible, so it's not like anyone in particular needs to do it. I... don't see any reason not to have as many kids as you can support if by 'you' you mean your country?"
"...well, most places don't do centralized state childcare. I guess Cheliax does it some."
"I don't know if they do that in the cities? I just mean the state will count people and talk to the druids and they're generally polite about giving you a heads-up about how many children they want to have so you don't bother having extras."
"If you malnourish a human woman long enough my understanding is that she'll stop bleeding and can't get pregnant, but she'll start again when she's not starving any more. With us, we don't start again till we have a great big feast. You can do the same thing quicker by losing a lot of blood and not getting healed till a few days later. So with some inconvenience we can be infertile on demand and fertile again whenever there's enough food to put together a feast. Also, elves don't like babies. We just don't find them cute or appealing or anything, they're kind of gross. So, surface elves are usually infertile and gradually going extinct, but drow have slaves take care of our babies and most of us have lots and lots - and then kill a lot of those, if food related circumstances change during the pregnancy or the baby looks sickly or malformed or it's not the gender you had in mind or, when they're a little older, they didn't catch sorcery or aren't quick enough to be a cleric or a wizard and you had your heart set on a caster. It's really weird that my mom killed only one baby."
"I... guess that would amount to the same thing if you can't plan ahead or do a census or anything."
"Is there secret human birth control Nidal has and isn't exporting? I was figuring you guys just killed babies sometimes like everybody else."
"No, drow aren't Good, but humans who are aspiring to Good frequently have babies they can't afford, if you've seen a cleric looking after a ridiculous herd of children that's because their parents are either dead or out of ability to feed more kids."
"...That does sound like something that would happen if you don't take censuses and you constantly go to war so you have no idea what your population will be. I mean, we do kill extras, that absolutely happens, but we have a target."
"...I'm still not successfully forming a confident belief about whether you guys have birth control? Is there or is there not a thing people in Nidal can do that will let them have unrestricted sex without conceiving any babies."
"Of course? You just have to cut - okay, I got that far into that sentence and suddenly I understood why foreigners don’t do it that way. Uh. And I guess you also wouldn’t be able to use any Nidalese plants. Huh."
"Yeah. Do you still think a lot of people wouldn't be interested in learning to deal with pain now?"
"I mean, coping with pain is really useful, and if you were about to tell me about a series of ten meditative exercises I can do about it I'm all ears, I just don't think that's how you accomplish the feat."