"Cream of chicken. I already know I don't like anything spicy, we had spicy food back home."

"- I guess that makes sense, come to think. Would it behoove opponents of the Midnight Lord to give up chili peppers?" She takes the spicy beef anyway and passes him the cream of chicken.

He shrugs and spreads his hands. And then he tries the cream of chicken and announces that it doesn't suck.

"A rave review. I was pretty wowed by the food when I came upstairs, I had to really dip into the willpower to avoid gorging myself, but probably it's much the same in Nidal except for obligatory piles of pepper?"

"They're not obligatory, I've had some really bland porridge in my time. There's just - well, back in my home town we never had parsley or cilantro or almost anything else they flavor food with here. We have different plants. The meat's more similar."

"There's some trade with Nidal, isn't there? Through Cheliax mostly? I wonder why the herbs haven't made it out."

"Because they don't grow very well in the dark? I expect they have tons of rosemary in Pangolais and I guess it probably passes through Nisroch if it comes by sea. Not so much my home village of less than fifty people in the middle of the Uskwood that's literally called 'the village'."

"You grow plants in the dark? I will buy you considerably more than dinner if you can tell me how to do that, I'll make a killing downstairs."

He laughs. "I could hold you to that! I won't, though. First, you buy the seeds from the Midnight Lord. Then when his loyal druid servants who maintain the forest come by each year with fertilizer, you don't ask questions, you just mix it with water and irrigate everywhere. Be sure you honor the druids properly, and it helps to live in Nidal since the seeds are adapted for the local temperature and rainfall patterns."

"Oh, if druids are doing it and the seeds are unholy that makes all the difference. You don't get a ton of drow druids. The seeds would still be worth a lot, though, if they'll grow in a cave even at lower yield than they would at home."

"I didn't bring any seeds but I'd go with a merchant ship or a teleporting merchant adventuring party for the right price."

"If you want to move to Osirion you might be able to pull together the right price. They have cities, but there's plenty of farming along the river for you to live by when you're not finding adventuring parties. And they trade with drow, so they'd see the upside of dark-tolerant plants."

"I don’t want to move to a desert just because they might possibly have one job for me, maybe, if I managed to find the right person."

"It's a nice desert - well, I've actually spent almost no time in the farms, just the desert proper in transit and Sothis, I guess I don't know enough to talk it up all that much."

"Is it bright and full of glare and big and empty and lonely with no plants except for right by the river?"

"It's a very very big river and it floods annually, so if I understand correctly it's a pretty big swathe that can grow stuff and not just a narrow riverbank, but the desert part is like that yep."

"Terrible. Maybe the farms are better."

"Long trips through the desert were the best way to get my party members to agree that the sky fireball is excessive."

"The sun is great when it's behind a layer of clouds so thick you can look straight at it."

"I'm a fan of starlight, personally."

"Yeah. I saw the stars on the way here, while I was at sea. You never get to see them in Nidal - I'd heard that there were stars but I didn't remember it enough to expect them."

"...what have they done with the stars?"

"It's cloudy? It's just cloudy. Thick, dark clouds over the whole sky all the time."

"Oh. The 'darkness' portion of the portfolio, I take it."

"Yeah. Hey, how come you go back and forth between using his title and using his name?"