"You can work as a nanny for pay, in Osirion."

"Yeah. Sure.

"What could she be, if she were stuck there?"

"- the constraint would be the 'if captured by the wrong people, the world ends'. Not the gender. She could teach magic, maybe. Do magic research."

"I guess she could probably live with that."

"Hopefully the deep plane's not quite that dangerous and she can do whatever she wants."

"Yeah. I guess in that case we'll be back to figuring out whether 'Cheliax, less the executions' is a place that exists."

"It's not that we wouldn't set you up at home but - you've said what you think of it. And an Osirian woman who went through all of this would have a hard enough time going back, really."

"How so? - I guess maybe if I had any virtue I'd be worried about losing it, or something."

"Not supposed to spend the night alone in underground temples with strange men, yes. I'm glad you're not Osirian because - I can't marry you and Fazil would not entirely believe me that I can't."

"That sounds like a story. But I assume if Fazil doesn't get to hear it then neither do I."

Headshake.

"Your turn, then."

"Have a boyfriend back home? Or a girlfriend?" 

"Nah. Had kids."

Nod.

"I guess asking the same thing about you is kind of a waste of a question."

"We've been on the move for over a year now. Not great for staying in touch with anyone back home."

Nod. "How'd you find out about the Deep Plane stuff?"

"Got a commission to retrieve some personal effects that'd been with a caravan that got hijacked on the southern coast. We don't usually do operations with people as adversaries, but the price was very good and someone was going to take it, and something felt - off. We took it. Asked a bunch of old friends to help out, because taking people alive is thrice as much of a hassle.

Lucky that we did, because we encountered a force significantly greater than advertised. We won, but it was a close thing, and then ten minutes after the fighting died down we were attacked again by a different group. We took the 'personal effects' we'd been sent for and Mahdi used an emergency teleport out.

We were pretty sure by that point that something was fishy, so we went to a friend who's good with traps and got help opening the box. It contained instructions about where to find the gate and how to open it, and some - holy texts, I guess, of the cultists. Fazil asked his church for a loan to go look into it more. We were timesharing the carpet, at that point, with two other adventuring groups - the loan let us buy it outright. Went and talked to some experts on cultists of Rovagug. One of them recognized the instructions and told us about the Deep Plane, and told us where to go find Teriesh. He was dead, of course, and when we came back so was the expert, but we had some leads on the kids by then."

"How many kids?"

"He had ten, originally, that we know of. Most of them were already dead. There were four alive. - weren't fast enough to the first three."

Nod.

"Your turn, I guess."

"What happened to her mom?"

"Executed when Verita was a year old. Primary worship of other gods."

Nod.