Gnomes. Varan isn't going to disobey, though. First of all because he has no better ideas for avoiding giving offense than just doing whatever anyone wants him to, and second because that actually sounds really helpful. He visits the café.

There is a young lady meeting the description looking around for him at the restaurant in question.

Varan walks up to her and asks if she's the person he's supposed to meet. His voice is quiet, his posture very deliberately nonthreatening and aiming for not seeming scared but compromising wherever that might possibly involve seeming in any conceivable way threatening.

"Yeah, I'm Belmarniss. You're Varan? Apparently you made an impression on my mom's gnome friend."

"I think she was just interested in Nidal but if that counts, I guess."

"Well, it's interesting, not a ton of people make it out."

"I guess the people who want to leave and the people who can leave mostly aren't the same people."

"Cheliax is like that too, or tries to be, but one meets more of their defectors. Possibly my sample's odd because they often shelter at the Worldwound and I guess you'd have no strong reason to do that."

"I've never heard anything good about Cheliax. I'd definitely leave - but I guess I'd also leave Nidal." Shrug. "Never been to the Worldwound."

"Me and my adventuring buddy pop up there now and then, kill a few demons, nearly die, go home for a while. It's a good place to get into straightforward fights if you want the circles, and I do, but it's cold and unpleasant. What do they say about Cheliax in Nidal? I think of them as geopolitical twins, albeit not identical twins."

He laughs, startled. "Uh, they’re weak, they’re easy prey when they come visiting, Cheliax has a fucked-up justice system because they have this stupid god of suffering and he lets them - " Varan's been getting worked up and animated but he abruptly cuts himself off and says something softer and more aware of his audience. "They, uh, mostly don’t torture rich people. Because Asmodeus says torture is for making people weaker than you unhappy."

"- huh. Let's get a table, I want to take notes if you don't mind -" She pulls a chair at one of the outdoor tables.

Whichever table she wants is fine with him.

"Would you say Zon-Kuthon is not a god of suffering or just that he is not a stupid god of suffering?"

"First thing," he says with a tiny shy hint of something that might be a grin.

"What's his domain, then?"

"I think that might be a term of art but if you just mean what he's a god of, darkness and pain. Sometimes people suffer when they’re in the dark or in pain but that isn’t important."

"Huge fan of the dark myself! Who needs a stupid sky fireball, besides all the plants in the world? Are there people who are similarly huge fans of pain? In, uh, quite that much generality, I know there's people who like it if you pull their hair in bed or whatever."

Varan kind of boggles at this question. "Of course? I don't know anyone I'm confident wouldn't ever mind any pain but I think they'd tend to move to Pangolais instead of staying in the sticks where I'm from and - well, I get closer over time. Everyone I knew at home was closer than people here. Except this one person I met once who just seemed... incredibly tired of absolutely everything all the time. Come to think of it, I don't actually know that my aunt had any positive feelings about pain at all, but she never complained."

"...those observations don't strongly suggest to me that the Nidalese are legitimately huge fans of pain or even that most of them with exceptions like your aunt are."

"I don't think most people anywhere like all pain. I do think I'm a basically random person who didn't just end up here because of especially liking pain, and I'm confident no one in Absalom could make me scream. It's kind of hard to tell how much the people back home liked pain more than you, though, we don't have stuff like games that aren't painful to play or anything like that." Very slight shrug. "It doesn't matter unless you hate the sun enough to pack up and leave everything you've ever known, or, actually I have no idea if you grew up here."

"Oh, no, I grew up in Noctimar, which is under Taldor, my parents moved here after I had them resurrected. Is it pretty feasible in Nidal to steer for kinds of pain you like?"

"Pretty much? Once you're an adult, anyway, or if your parents are nice. You want to not piss anybody off - my mother pissed my aunt off and she knows some spells so obviously my aunt broke her fingers at the same time as she stole her spellbook, but she really did have it coming, so just don't have it coming. Anyway, as long as you're nice - and not a pushover, because you probably don't want to end up at the mercy of the first person who has their eye on you, better you beat everyone who wants you for their sweetheart or just hold out for someone who likes the complement of what you like. I did the second thing. Uh, to be totally honest, it only worked for a year or so and then they wanted to hurt me in a way I wasn't comfortable with and I skipped town, so you might want to make sure you're on top of any relationship you get into if you're really worried about that - honestly, I wouldn't be really worried about that, if you've been to the Worldwound and survived you're probably stronger than anyone in most villages. And, hm, you'd have a hard time avoiding being whipped for Night's Return but it wouldn't really be that hard a sell if you wanted to do something like have all the skin removed from your ears instead. At least, not where I'm from. There might be places where you just absolutely can't - well, you can probably get away with a lot in most villages as long as you can convince the whole village not to gang up on you like they would if you were Chelish. I guess I don't really know how you do it in the cities, everyone says Pangolais especially isn't safe at all and you shouldn't go there if you can help it. I guess the hardest thing is really that it's hard to get anyone to cure you if you get sick, harder than it is out here because the Midnight Lord's clerics don't heal people and you have to get a druid to do it. Other than that... yeah, pretty easy to stick to kinds of pain you like okay."

"To be clear, I am in no way considering moving to Nidal, I'm just curious about it, you don't need to get specific about what circle of sorcerer I'd need to be to assure what kind of treatment."

"...Yeah. Makes sense. So how's Noctimar?"

"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."

"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?"

"It's not an accident, I for one worked hard on learning to like it."

"By happy accident it transpires that it is possible for people to do that, and moreover possible to do that under the conditions Nidal enjoys."

"Yeah."

"And although Nidal is now not notably more fertile or verdant than its neighbors - is it? - modern Nidalese, presuming themselves to be descended from the founders who made this arrangement, are construed by themselves and each other to all be beholden to their ancestral pact, in - gratitude that they exist, instead of whoever would have eventually moved into the area if those ancestors had told the Midnight Lord to fuck off."

"It's definitely richer. It's - more richer than it looks like, because it's paying for people to, you know, take time off work a lot, and it's paying for the Joyful Things - but I think a random village in Nidal is richer than a random village in Osirion in terms of, uh, things besides pain. And we don't go to Hell or Nirvana when we die - I know people here aren't scared of Nirvana and are scared of Xovaikain so I guess maybe you can teach yourself to cope with being a fucking songbird but I'd rather be scared of being a songbird than scared of being tortured."

"I can turn into - well, not a tiny songbird, I can't get much smaller than an eagle, but a bird, and I like it! Flying is amazing! Songbird's not a bad draw at all if one goes to Nirvana, I'd be worried about being a snail or something."

"...I guess that's one way it's less bad than being a snail."

"I haven't the circles to let you desensitize to being a bird but I can cast Fly on you if you like... what, would you rather snail over bird?"

"I don't care. And being a bird sounds fun. Being Nirvana's trophy sounds awful. What is the point of being a songbird in Nirvana, just looking pretty?"

"You know, I actually have a trip to Nirvana not-quite-planned, a cleric friend of mine recommended it and said he'd ask around for colleagues who could do the Plane Shift. Do you want me to find somebody there and ask that? Anything else you'd want me to ask?"

Varan takes a second to breathe evenly. "I don't know. I can't offer to resurrect them."

"- well, it's a very sweet impulse, but I was imagining more, uh, informational questions."

"Do you often find it easy to come up with things to ask of people who are being horribly misused - is that the only reason you're even talking to me? There's nothing I can do for them and I can't really think about it past that. Maybe if they have requests or something, for things they wish someone could get done now that they're... helpless..." It is really noticeably effortful for him to finish that sentence.

"I'm talking to you because Rynaeri's friend thought we'd have an informative chat. I am... finding this particular line of alarm from you very... uninformative. What in the world have you been told about Nirvana, the being an animal thing is I think correct but they can, like, talk and move and stuff - I can't think of one single thing I imagine a person being able to accomplish from Xovaikain and not from Nirvana unless it is literally and specifically 'be tortured for Zon-Kuthon's appreciation'."

"At least that's something, being pretty for Shelyn's appreciation doesn't even pay back someone who's done anything for me. - And velstracs do things all the time, they're like devils. In Nirvana all they do is be pretty or try to talk the Mother of Souls into giving them more people. Nobody summons Good outsiders to run their prisons or anything."

"I don't do a ton of summoning but - a prison would definitely be a weird choice of job for a celestial, sure? People do summon angels for things even if an agathion wouldn't be a classic choice for most standard issue purposes - or, no, I met somebody with a slivanshee familiar up at the worldwound, so presumably it helped fight demons. Empyreal lords are basically minor deities with domains they work on like any other god. It takes a while to get anywhere influential from 'petitioner' but I think that's true of most afterlives."

"Huh. That's... not as bad as it could be." He doesn't want to face an age as a songbird but it seems better than facing eternity that way. "Is Hell also less bad than it sounds or does Asmodeus really just want everyone to suffer as much as possible all the time?"

"I think he's slightly more complicated than that - I think he enjoys it when people struggle not to suffer ideally by taking on some of the causing-suffering tasks themselves and you can't get them to do that if it will obviously never work, so there are some occasions when some people are not acutely suffering. Otherwise Hell is lots of suffering, but some people say that you can just hang out on the first layer, being on fire, for as long as you want, and only proceed to more elaborate torments on a voluntary basis, so if you happen to have cultivated a tolerance for being on fire or expect you'd be able to, and feel you could accomplish anything neat from that position, I guess Hell shouldn't scare you too much."

"...Well, I don't have any idea what I could possibly accomplish in Hell, but that's definitely better than I thought it was..." He probably needs a lot more practice to be capable of coherent thought while on fire. "Can you just... stay in Avernus and tell jokes to the other people who are lucid enough to appreciate them? Or I guess I could - hmm, no, I think the fire would get in the way of scratching nice designs into my flesh. But if I could make Hell nice - it's not really as much serving the Midnight Lord as going to Xovaikain but I'd still be on fire forever, so I wonder if that's good enough? Because - assuming you're not lying to trick me into going to Hell, which I have absolutely no proof you're not doing - I wonder if I should aim for Hell. It might be best for everyone."

"I would actually recommend Axis for you. I find it really unlikely that they have any mechanism to prevent you from torturing yourself if this should happen to bring you satisfaction of some kind, and the rest of the time you get to be a completely normal human shaped person walking around normal places like cities and parks, getting a normal job if you're into that, talking to who-all else is there. And if you ever did decide you weren't pleased with the torturing yourself they have lots of lawyers who could help you figure out a way to exit your apparent contract with Zon-Kuthon."

"Maybe you also think Axis doesn’t suck as much as I’ve heard?"

"I have heard glowing firsthand-observer reports of Axis being a place with normal cities and normal people wandering around getting rich. What bad things did you hear?"

"That it was a city," Varan deadpans.

"Odd complaint from a man who has chosen to live in Absalom for any period of time."

"I hate Absalom and I’m thinking of moving to Taldor where they have farms. Also I’m pretty sure everything about Absalom that doesn’t suck is because you're allowed to worship the Dreamer here, but you can't worship her in Axis, Axis is Lawful. And not even Good - without any Good people and being ruled by Lawful gods it's probably a lot more like Nisroch than Absalom, and Nisroch is awful. And also? If I have to pick between having all my Good impulses eaten away and having all of my Evil impulses eaten away I definitely don’t pick both - I don’t know if you have to become an axiomite but I sure wouldn’t want to."

"I think most people don't aim to become axiomites. It's possibly the least turning-you-into-a-something-else afterlife out there. I don't know if it's all cities, I can ask my Abadaran friend, but that's admittedly what they advertise. Heaven advertises the Summerlands, though. Farms as far as the eye can see."

"Heaven is the one where they lost their leader because she was pathetic and couldn’t keep going just because her husband died, so now they’re ruled by some upstart with absolutely no positive vision for what Heaven could be who’s just singlemindedly devoted to destroying Evil, you know, like my entire family? I hate Iomedae."

"I mean, yes, as someone with an entire family I too have been known to feel this way, but the Summerlands in particular is Erastil's bag and he's the god of farms."

"Maybe he’s fine but it sounds like he takes his marching orders from Iomedae these days."

"I think he doesn't... march a ton? Like, the Lawful Good corner of the chart is absolutely very Iomedae-forward in philosophy and message but if you meet an actual Erastilian they're going to be like 'you should get married to someone who complements you, remember to leave your fields fallow some of the time, looks like rain'."

He makes a face. One of the components of the face he's making is a small smile.

"Yep, that's how it goes. And then the tax collectors come and take their share to pay for the schools and everything. I don't want to pay taxes to Iomedae."

"I guess that's a fair thing to not want. - I'm going to go actually get some food, do you want me to grab you something while I'm up?"

"Sure, how about a reasonable amount of something you recommend? I haven't found many foreign foods I like yet but if I take enough recommendations maybe I'll like something."

"...the way you feel like you need to specify 'a reasonable amount' leaves me suddenly unconvinced that I know what amount that is."

"What I meant was 'don't grab every scrap of food in the place and say I owe you for it' but how about I just get myself something after you."

"Oh, I was just gonna buy you dinner, I have adventurer money and you're interesting."

"Oh! Thanks." He smiles, ducking his head and turning away like he's embarrassed about that.

"No problem." She goes off and comes back with a fruit platter and two different soups. "Do you want spicy beef or cream of chicken?"

"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?"

"Just based on what flows best in the sentence. He's got a very mellifluous title, I seldom wind up saying 'Master of the First Vault' or 'Old Deadeye' but 'Midnight Lord' is nearly as fun to say as 'Dawnflower'."

He stares at her like this is completely outside the range of expected answers. "Oh. So it doesn’t mean anything?"

"No, would it in Nidal?"

"Yeah. I’ll call Asmodeus by name because he doesn’t scare me. Or some Chelish so-called god who's literally younger than our mortal rulers."

"People with the greatest of respect for Iomedae also use her name. I imagine if she didn't like it she'd have changed it on ascent if not before."

Shrug. "I guess that makes sense. Well, I guess if I ever want to worship her I'll presumably call her whatever she wants to be called since if I ever want to worship her it'll probably be because I've decided everything in Nidal is worthless."

"I haven't done my deep dive into theology yet, I'm saving that till I'm closer to going for the Starstone, but my guess from my shallow incursions is that the orthodox Iomedaean view is something like 'net negative' and not 'worthless'? The difference being somewhat academic, but - I've spent too much time in Osirion, all my analogies are coming out Abadaran -"

"What do they think is - not worth whichever thing it's - " Varan trips over his tongue a bit and takes a breath and tries again. "Which things are they putting on which side when they sum us all up to 'net negative'?"

"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."

"I guess there are many ways in which that is superior to the drow system."

"What's the drow system?"

"Do you know how the elf fertility convenience works?"

"Nope."

"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."

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."

"The Osirians like to keep tabs on their dead inasmuch as they can. Random scries, routine tourism to Aktun. Do you have comparable reason to believe some people are in fact being okay in Xovaikain?"

"I can’t scry but people talk to velstracs sometimes? And it stands to reason, right? If I keep getting better at dealing with pain, I’ll probably be ready in another few decades. Lots of humans live that long. And I might cope with pain better than average but not that much better. And it would have been really stupid of our ancestors to make a deal that would make them and all their children and grandchildren and so on wish they’d never been born - and, like, velstracs clearly don’t all kill themselves. But I only have that secondhand."

"...I have never met a velstrac. What are they like?"

"They're... beautiful, and smart, and terrifying, and covered in chains, and they remake themselves with all the coolest parts they can scavenge - but they're still them, just - not human anymore, they don't come back to be with their spouses or take care of their parents but I don't think angels or demons or whatever do that, either. They are outsiders, they're not exactly our people anymore. But someone from my home town who went to Pangolais and wrote a letter back mentioned meeting someone else from my home town who'd died a while before that. She - the dead person, the velstrac - was working as a torturer, unnerving people on purpose, that kind of thing, and didn't have time to catch up - or couldn't really have a... friendly kind of conversation? I don't think you can be friends with outsiders, anyway? But she did say hi and let him know it was her. I don't really know how outsiders are besides dangerous and not people you can make friends with and definitely not human anymore. I - saw a velstrac once, but all I know about her was that she was explaining something complicated about the nature of Evil to a foreigner."

"I've heard in Lastwall they'll do things like update people's graves with what kind of angel they are but I think it takes long enough that you wouldn't get a story like that, huh, I wonder if velstracs are just quicker and why... I acknowledge that it would have been stupid of your ancestors to do that, do you think that's a reason to think that instead it was some other non-stupid thing?"

"Well... yeah? Do you know a lot of people who've made deals that make them and all their children wish they'd never been born?"

"I don't know a lot of people who've had the opportunity to get quite that wide-ranging about it, but I know people with tendencies that would tend to pickle them that way if they had the chance."

He's always heard that the Nidalese are stronger than other people and kind of a breed apart. He doesn't mention this because it seems really unlikely to be convincing and he actually has no good reason to think it's true.

"I guess I can't prove that the people who've stayed in power since Earthfall instead of drowning in their bathtubs like Chelish kings aren't idiots."

"...you know they aren't just, out of nowhere, drowning in their bathtubs, right, those are assassinations."

"Yep. And by people who... won so completely that they didn't need to admit to there having been a fight at all?"

"Asmodeus happens not to care if there's infighting among the Thrunes he's backing and Zon-Kuthon went with an approach that involves a lot of individual continuity, I'm not sure that's down to anybody's skill as a negotiator."

And maybe that reflects how much stupider you have to be to deal with Asmodeus.

"I guess."

"Doing things that are awful for one's children isn't even rare, certainly commoner than knowing self-sabotage."

That does give him pause.

"...Yeah. That happens."

"And people - humans compared to elves and probably everybody compared to, like, gods - are bad at thinking about really big numbers, really long periods of time..."

"If you say so."

"I do, but if you haven't seen it I guess it wouldn't be convincing - how old are you -"

"Depending on whether you count by new years or birthdays and whether you zero-index it I might be nineteen."

"Nineteen-ish, okay. So, yeah, keep an eye out for that as you get a broader perspective on the passage of time, I guess."

"Okay."

She finishes her soup and returns the dish to the restaurant she got it from.

Right. Soup. He eats his a bit faster instead of halfway ignoring it.

When she's back from that, he has another question. "Does the Dreamer have churches around here or - are there things people do to serve her, you know, publicly?"

"She's got churches. They're not... very consistently staffed... but there's at least one a few blocks inland from the east end of the docks."

"Thanks. What do I... do, do I bring her an offering? Is money a good offering?"

"Money's money because everybody likes it and I don't know anything more specific about her proclivities."

"I do. I’ve just never wanted people to know I pray to her before - but it seems safer if everyone knows, here."

"I don't think it's particularly unsafe to be widely known as an irreligious sort, but - 'confusing Desnan' is probably a little safer than 'Nidalese refugee of ambiguous loyalties', yeah."

"Yeah. Hey, do you want to get together again at some point after this?"

"Sure, why not, though I'll disappear if a time-sensitive adventure calls my name."

"Makes sense."

"Next week, same time same place? I like this food court."

He smiles kind of a lot. "Yeah!"

"See you then! Good luck at Desna's!"