"I did not consider it particularly urgent to extract my sister when she looked okay on occasional scries but I did not choose to go on living there. It's only shockingly deadly for small children though."

"I'm sorry to hear that?" What is even productive to say here. Definitely not that he's never even considered that his sister might want to be rescued. Definitely also not that Nidal doesn't suck that much.

"There's a lot of worshiping demons, they're more popular than full-blown gods among drow - I think mostly because they're less picky, you can get a cleric circle off a demon by showing up reliably for a little while whereas a big guy like Abadar or Iomedae or whoever will sometimes ignore people who spend years in divinity studies and work at a temple for their whole lives for having the wrong attitude. But there's some Lamashtans and Urgathoans, just less commonly. There's a lot of murder, in large part because there's a lot of food insecurity - fertilizer's hard to come by, and light, so people rely on underground rivers with fish and growing mushrooms and raising animals that can live on mushrooms, with some magically lit gardens and surface raiding filling in all the dietary gaps. Lot of slavery, about as many slaves as drow, and male drow are mostly styled as non-slaves rather than practically treated as non-slaves. But it doesn't seem too likely that you want to be a tourist in Noctimar, I was expecting you to want me to explain things about surfacers like the ones among whom we find ourselves today."

"Honestly, I didn't expect them to turn out to be that different."

"From... Nidalese people?"

"From anywhere underneath Taldor. Since you learn from people you trade with a lot unless you really, really hate them."

"Oh, there's not a lot of trade between drow and surfacers most places. Just stealing. And hatred, though it's usually not quite that emphatic. Osirion is working on it because they're just that excited about trade."

"Oh. Did everyone you met congratulate you on leaving and then get really disappointed that you hadn't turned on your entire family and your - demon lord, I guess - and decided every single thing they disagreed with your old country about was something you were blessed to be allowed to learn from them?"

"No, I'm too exotic-looking for that treatment, they're mostly like 'what are YOU' and 'do you eat BABIES'. - also I am not a particularly devout follower of any demon lord though I'll sing some of the bawdy Nocticula hymns when I'm bored."

"...I wasn't wondering if you ate babies," Varan says wryly. He is absolutely wondering it now but apparently asking is rude.

"I have not personally eaten babies but this is mostly just a coincidence; my parents had unusually few children, killed only one of them, and did that before I was on solid foods. I have eaten adults. There's not enough food downstairs to let it rot."

"Makes sense." Varan is completely unbothered about this. "Have you figured out how people make friends around here yet?"

"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."