He blinks. "It's not a secret? Are you telling me Good people have babies just to kill them??"

"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."

"Ah, you have a, shall we say 'surgical', option."

"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."

He frowns thoughtfully and considers this for a while before answering.

"So, there's really no substitute for practice, but I guess one thing you can do without any practice that's not totally useless is just to notice how much you - this is going to sound like I don't get it, I promise I don't mean this in the stupidest possible way - you know you don't know how to deal with it, and that's scary, and being scared sucks, and you can get yourself into a loop where that makes it scarier. And - if you're in pain, your heart will race in a way that you might - I promise I don't mean this in the stupidest way possible either - your heart will race and you'll feel something that isn't fear, but that you might think is fear because it's... part of fear? But it's also part of excitement. And you have more control over whether you have the other pieces of fear or the other pieces of excitement than you do over whether you feel the thing that's part of them both. Maybe. I don't actually know if drow work like that. I know more than that but a lot of it is stuff I know the same way I know how to walk."

She picks up the pace on the notetaking, though she's been doing it the whole time. "So - there are things that are correlates of the thing sucking, but also show up during things that don't suck? And those correlates might be held constant but if you learn to perceive the other moving pieces they have more wiggle room?"

"Yeah. I bet someone’s written an essay about - I hate this translation but I’ve heard it called 'experience without limits' in Taldane. I don’t know how you’d find it but I’m sure there’ll be something in Taldane."

"Experience without limits, what a phrase. Do you have a translation you'd like better?"

"Not as a catchy saying. It’s about how there are a million and one things that will make you feel like some experiences are... well, off-limits, or impossible, or unthinkable - like - like not being in Nidal. Like seeing the stars. Even if no one in your family has done that in generations, even if your whole country wants you not to - other people can make fences out of wood or stone or laws and force of arms, but don't let them make fences in your heart and soul out of your own thoughts." That's a kind of bad translation of something that's very catchy in the Shadowtongue. "It's not directly about coping with pain but it helps with... having experience breaking fear apart, and taking different perspectives on things you're experiencing - especially if - um - especially if, um - "

This is hard to say because, oops, saying it out loud in so many words really does feel unthinkable. He wants to say especially if you realize it's something Iomedae and Asmodeus and their ilk can't understand, or maybe Shelyn and her ilk, or - well, the thing is, there's no actual set of names of gods that he can put there that will convey what he wants to convey to Belmarniss, because she's not listening carefully for all the places where he doesn't say the other gods or the gods of Good. Because she lives in Absalom and if she respects the Dreamer, if she wants to comment on the Dreamer's teachings, she doesn't have to do it by carefully not including the Dreamer in comments about things the other gods don't believe in.

The Black Triune's agents are not going to jump out and drag him away if he finishes his sentence, though. It would really be something if he couldn't explain "experience without limits" because there was some line he couldn't cross, and he has, as he was just saying, been learning how to cross lines like this his whole life.

" - especially if you compare it to the Dreamer's teachings. About - well, I don't know how people say it in Absalom, but doesn't she like it when people try new things just because the breadth of your experience is your strength, something like that?"

"I like Desna well enough but I am not an expert on her deal. It doesn't sound terribly wrong, at least. It sounds like you have taken this ethos in an unorthodox direction? Or is it perfectly orthodox if you're willing to accept the risks, and the unorthodox thing would be never considering fleeing the country in the first place before even consciously considering those risks?"

"You don't have to actually do every dumb thing that crosses your mind. You just... decide not to. Instead of acting like the fact that your parents didn’t do something has you under a geas."

"Sounds reasonable enough as an approach, at least from my perspective as a fellow escapee from an evil society."

He laughs a little. "Speaking of Evil, have you got any idea what Good is?"

"It's a lot of things. I think most of it boils down to going out of your way to make life better for other people but then you've got oodles of quibbling to do about 'better' and 'out of your way' and 'other people'."

He smiles wryly. "Got it. If I spend all my time researching ways to torture zombies I'll be guaranteed to get into Heaven."

"Mm - when you were talking about what you would do with yourself in Hell I think there was an inkling there? You were talking about making it nice, telling the other petitioners jokes. - 'life' all by itself is not meant to be one of the words one quibbles about, I should probably have said 'existence' or something, except that's also imprecise because then what about all the possible situations where you're deciding whether to create or end an existence."

"...It's not going to mean anything to you if I say 'so you treat everyone like an Eternal Kiss sacrifice but only for the first ten days', is it?"

"Not unless you tell me what that is."

"Everyone gets together to give them their favorite food, or food made with fancy imported spices, or both, and they can have sex with whoever they want, and the only restriction on any of it is that they can't be tortured and can't change their mind and quit. It's not really sustainable but it's only a few days, they can get treated - almost like they're really injured or something, except without any real injuries, but also just - I don't know what else to compare it to or I would've picked a different comparison in the first place - basically you want them to have the most fun they can have without pain. And then after about ten or eleven days you've just about run out of nice things that don't hurt, so you torture them to death. I tried to volunteer once but my aunt wouldn't let me."

".........well, if they normally spend this period of time terrified and wishing they could instead change their mind and quit, or trying to do so, that would be an important disanalogy, and as you say it's not sustainable for this to be how everybody is treated all the time, but it's not a bad place to start otherwise. What did your aunt have against the idea?"

"She said she needed me to help with the harvest but I think she was also... you know, emotionally attached? Like she wanted to be able to see me in the future and she didn't want me to go to Xovaikain before I could be okay there."