...He snorts. "Wouldn't that be fun. No, Endarkened don't work that way. If I want to get a mortal girl pregnant I have to do it on purpose by magic."

"--What, really?"

"...Is it that surprising?"

"Yes! I've never heard of a pair of humanoid species that couldn't casually interbreed. I mean, some of them are less cross-fertile than they are fertile within their own species, but a dragon could have gotten Havalya pregnant by accident, and those aren't humanoid at all except when they shapeshift."

"Endarkened can only have children on purpose," says Nesifra. "And we're... very different from you. You and these humans are the same sort of thing in a way that you and I are very much not. We need not only magic but skill to bridge that gap."

"Huh. That's peculiar. Now I'm curious how dragons fit into this...it's really weird that you look so much more like us than a dragon does if you're so much more a different thing. I mean. Aside from the whole 'evil outsider' thing, I guess. Oh, that reminds me, you can't do anything more to someone after they're dead, right?"

"Hmm? Not usually," she says. "Though if they're fresh enough sometimes they can still be healed."

"No, no, I'm talking about souls, our kind of demon can mess with those sometimes and Havalya and Khesanai wanted some reassurance on that point."

"It isn't possible to reach a person's mind after they die, in our world."

She starts to say something, stops, and looks thoughtful.

"What do you mean by 'reach'?"

"Interact with in any way."

"--Huh. That's--kinda disturbing."

"What do you mean?"

"--Because there's a lot of ways to interact with dead people here and I'm not sure what the difference is between our planes but I wouldn't bet it was a positive one?"

"Something interesting happens when a mortal dies, and I don't have any reason to think it isn't their minds passing on to wherever it is mortals go. But no one knows where that is or what it's like there."

"Yeah...and that's concerning. Well. Maybe I can figure something out later."

"Figure something out? Such as what?"

"I mean the obvious thing to do would be to travel to your plane and try casting Speak With Dead."

"If returning there is possible. Although, if returning there is possible, it would be most convenient to do it either very soon or never."

"Well, Plane Shift is a spell, but it's not one I happen to have even if I did have my spellbook. On the other hand, that's a fixable problem. I'm not sure how fast, though, and it would require trusting me to cast the spell in the first place."

"Hmm."

She looks consideringly at Elodea.

"How urgently do we need to test my ability to extract languages from you?"

"Well I am getting really tired of being stuck to the ground like this and my translation spell's going to run out in--actually I'm not sure it depends on how long I was unconscious--and I can only cast it once more until I get access to my spellbook again, so sooner seems better than later to me, but I don't know what kind of timeframe you have before it's better not to go back again."

"I might like to experiment now, but I'm concerned that our other guests might be upset." She pets Khesanai some more. He's very pettable.

She switches languages. "Good news: they cannot as far as I can tell do anything to your souls. Bad news: they might end up torturing me because that's how their magic works for some reason and it would be way more convenient for everyone if they spoke Common."

"And you're...okay with this?" Havalya asks dubiously.