"Actually immortal races are pretty rare on the Material Plane. There's some on the other planes, though. Elves live to about their mid-seven hundreds, my mom and half-sister are a good bit older than me."

"I think necrons are immortal? No clue if they count. And daemons. But they probably count less, really."

Khelresse has been looking carefully bored during most of the conversation, but at the mention of relatives she lights up. "You have a sister?"

She tries to rein her expression in, but it doesn't fully work.

"A sister on my mom's side, who I grew up with. And at least one sister on my dad's side, who came as a bit of a surprise. I probably have more siblings on my dad's side somewhere."

"At least two siblings? That's wonderful.

I would have liked to have siblings, but, well, it wasn't in the family plans."

Hah. Yeah. Sisters. Great. (Okay, surprise sister is actually nice despite being a legally-sanctioned assassin. Older sister not so much.)

"What happened?"

"My mother had to take time off from performances to have me, more time than she'd really have liked to. It wasn't good for the cult's standing. So she decided that she only really needed one protegé, and didn't have any children after me.

It would have been nice to have a sister. To have someone to compete with who wasn't several centuries older.

Come to think of it, considering she's burned through one protegé, she might be having another child. Not that I'd know."

"I can see that. I don't have the best relationship with my older sister, but that might be more because of our mother. She had the bad habit of setting us against each other."

"I got set against my mother, it would have been nice to be set against someone with my own level of experience. But grass is always greener on the other side."
 

"Yeah. My sister and I were in a weird position, she was older than me but I was maturing faster, which I think exacerbated the problem."

"Yeah, that sounds like a recipe for friction."

"One of the many ways mixed-species families can get awkward."

"It seems like a set of circumstances rife with awkward potential."

"It kinda is. Would probably be less of a problem somewhere it's more common, upper-crust New Lyons just isn't the most diverse."

"Being mixed species is common is some places?"

"Yeah. A lot of the more similar species can interbreed, there's areas where it's more common. Not, like, majority, unless you count the tiefling lands, but decent minority."

"...Huh. Round here, being mixed species is, mm, not a thing that just happens? Not naturally, at least. So a place where there a decent minority sounds odd."

"Might be our magic that's the difference? Very magical creatures like dragons can cross-breed with just about anything."

"Yep, sounds like a magic thing, considering our mixed species people tend to be made with tech? ...against their will, usually. Magic seems much nicer."

"Magic's as nice as the person using it, most times."

"Yeah, I'd imagine. But still, a system where the normal way to be mixed species is 'when a mummy elf and a daddy human love each other very much--' instead of "you pissed off a haemonculus and they thought it would be degrading' seems overall nicer? Even if someone could also magically make you mixed species to degrade you, or whatever."

"That's not too common, fortunately."

"Which is a nice thing about your world."

Nod. "We could do without the evil gods and beings like liches, but it sounds like your world has plenty of problems with those, too."

"I was about to say 'at least we don't have liches,' but the basically-immortal, torture-happy rich folk may as well be. Each world seems to have it's own good and bad, and some shared good and bad too."