"We'll take it," one of them says to another. Gold changes hands. The fourth man leaves.

A purplish-black foreigner with her own tinted goggles currently perched on her forehead under her hood stops hovering around the crystal ball hoping for a turn. "Scared of the dark?" she wonders in the direction of the folks who bought the goggles.

"Why, got potions for that?"

"Got eyes."

He looks at her more closely. "Are you... a drow?"

"Noooo, I had a tragic accident with paint. And bleach. And some kind of obscure vision curse."

Snort. "Happens to the best of us. Mahdi here was cursed by a horrible troll to be hideous."

"To be hideous to fools," Mahdi corrects him. "You can only see my handsome true form if you have an intelligence above that of the troll that cursed me."

"Are you looking to travel?" 

"Sure, I bop around all over the place."

"We have a commission for a search and rescue. Clients were traders travelling through a passage under the Brazen Peaks when the passage entry on this side was sealed."

"And by 'traders' we almost definitely mean they were slavers. Though they didn't admit that."

"Lawful good party here," says Fazil. "Gonna get everyone out and file a report with law enforcement. If that's gonna be a problem you can sign on with someone else."

"So you're only rescuing some of the missing persons?" she asks, raising an eyebrow. "I guess that's better than leaving them all to die."

"The reason the passage was sealed is that smuggling slaves from Katapesh is illegal, they'll go free if we can find them. Or do you mean the slavers. They will probably be in some amount of legal trouble but I can't say this will haunt me."

"Nah, I meant are we delivering a bunch of terrified halflings to somebody whose job does not involve unterrifying them. If they go free because somebody didn't mind their tax returns then I'm on board."

"Great, what do you do?"

"Arcane spellcasting. Buffs and utility mostly. Also see in the dark, I do that."

"All right. We'll be a little deficient at slaughtering things but we're mostly hoping we won't need to. We carry a scroll of Teleport for emergencies, we aren't budgeted for resurrections, if you pick fights stupidly we'll tell you to go home on your own. The commission's 6800 gold, for the safe retrieval of the six free members of the caravan. Half for their bodies."

"I have insurance," she says. "It's a nice local custom, insurance. Is that to share or for each of us if we don't add anybody?"

"That's to split. We were also offered a split of the contents of the caravan but if they're what we suspect there'll be nothing to split there."

"Eh, who knows, maybe somebody wedged a box of saffron under a loose board."

"It is possible we are slandering some very upstanding spice traders whose rescuers just didn't want to specify that they were spice traders and in that case we will all have lots of spice on top of the money."

"You ready to leave tonight?" asks Fazil. 

"I can be."

"Great. Ah, I'm Fazil. Cleric of Abadar, eighth level."

"Hagan, ranger, ninth."

"Mahdi, wizard, eighth."

"Belmarniss, Niss is fine if that's too long, four in an obscure kinda sorcerer you've never heard of and six in wizard."

"How'd you end up in Osirion?"

"Doing a research project, you have stats here that are worth knowing. Also the death insurance."

"Insured with the church? So we know where to bring your body, if it comes up."

"Yup. Boy did they give me funny looks."

"I wasn't entirely sure drow existed at all but all the sources I had on their existing-at-all say that they're a babymurdering matriarchy and all chaotic evil."

"All is a very strong word. I won't dispute the babymurdering matriarchy."

He appears to try to think of a response, think better of several, and give up.

"We're bringing two weeks of rations."

"Yum. If you do have babymurdering matriarchy related questions I've probably heard them before."

"See, most of the things I think of are things that are especially rude knowing you've heard them before, such as 'did you know that killing babies is wrong' and 'wait if you're a matriarchy can't you just make the dads stick around'."

"I'm actually not convinced on the first thing. See, suppose you have a drow baby. Whose mom has killed babies before and will kill babies again and will have extra babies specifically in order to kill them and is probably planning to kill some medium-sized kids too. And you can hand that baby off to some middle-of-the-road sorts who like to hang out in the Boneyard bringing up random babies. Does it really matter all that much if the intervening step involves feeding the baby to a spider, considering? But I haven't personally killed any babies, if you're secretly five babies in a coat and anxious about it."

"Well, it's bad for the mother. Guess it's kind of hard to argue that it's bad for the baby. - the mom is going to kill some medium-sized kids too?"

"Yeah. The dead babies are mostly boys. They wait a while with girls, see if we're any good. In the non-technical sense."

"'s pretty fucked up."

"Yup."

"All drow everywhere are like that? Or just your country?"

"Haven't checked them all. I've been told that much is all the same but perhaps I'm the victim of a vicious propaganda campaign."

"Aren't we all."

"You know astonishingly little theology for someone who should've been on the receiving end of a vicious propaganda campaign about it."

"I was very stupid in school so all the vicious propaganda missed me."

"There's at least some vicious propaganda around in some places, but while I'm not in the market for its exact implementation I respect the shit out of the local church for ever actually checking where people are going."

"I've tried to convince other people to try it and they usually think it's missing the point. 'true followers of our god all make it to Heaven, so you just have to ask yourself if you're a true follower, not what other people are doing'."

"It's an expensive thing to try if you aren't pretty sure the results will flatter your rulers. - not saying they're faked. They're done publicly. Just - anyone who wasn't pretty proud of their results to start wouldn't even think about getting them systematically."

"Enh, maybe you could do it as part of an inquisition or something."

"I know someone who's working on a more sensitive version of that Early Judgment spell that shows people a glimpse of their afterlife. If you get that good enough to ping for everyone you could take statistics on the still-living."

"Sounds like a good project."

"Do you know how you read?"

"Nope. You can check me if you want, although you should be aware that my vicious propaganda campaign thinks drow all read chaotic evil no matter what we do because Pharasma's racist. I don't think that's fully true but technically all I'm certain of is that she's not insurmountably racist against infants."

"I wouldn't expect - actually I should just check and not argue. Detect Alignment.

- chaotic good, see, going to get you some raised eyebrows in Osirion but it's a perfectly good afterlife."

"I don't think it'd agree with me, actually. I'd take Nirvana if I both could pick and had to. They do the actually caring where people wind up from the other end, see."

"Well, if you want to be more lawful I guess you're in the right party."

"I'm chaotic good."

"But he has to work very hard at it," he says to Belmarniss. "Since he can't, you know, break any laws."

"Sure, give me lawfulness tips, can't hurt."

"Mostly, I try to imagine explaining myself to someone who is basically decent but has no confidence in my judgment or my honesty or my reasonableness being above the human average - so I can't lean on 'sure this would've been a terrible decision for most people, but you trust me, right -' and if it sounds, in my head, like I'm making excuses, I don't do that. I can ...try to give examples, or something, as it comes up."

"See, people who don't think I'm outperforming my species to begin with aren't going to hear me out, they're going to throw rocks at me."

"- yeah. You can mostly only be lawful in a society that believes in your capacity for lawfulness. That's why Osirion's the way it is. I don't know if there's still a way to imagine it, though."

"Even if I imagine I've put on my Regular Elf spell first I'm just not sure the described approach is for me. I like doing things that would look like a terrible decision as implemented by most people and plan to do lots."

"Then the alignment's not very surprising."

"Elysium's all right. No one'll stop you from continuing to meddle in the world, if you wanna and can figure out how."

"Oh, I'm not saying it'd drive me to despair, or anything."

"And lots of people get lawfuller late in life. When they settle down. I guess possibly you do not plan to do that."

"I suppose the urge could strike but not really."

"Killing kids is evil so that might be driving a lot of the - universalness of the alignment among drow."

"Well, it doesn't explain the men."

"Huh. - might also be evil to get a woman with a child if she's going to kill it. I'm not sure. That'd have important implications if so."

"I suppose given how illegal killing babies around here is you don't have stats on whether slaves go to Hell for their owners murdering their baby."

"Is that the most apt comparison?"

"Bought, sold, returned for refunds if they don't perform, power of life and death over 'em, the whole cave of bats."

They all look quite disconcerted at this. 

"So why are you...against slavery."

"...because it's horrible?"

"That's just not usually a position people arrive at when it's everywhere."

"Well, most people are kind of boring and the way people are boring is they do whatever's everywhere. Obviously I'm not doing that."

Snort. "Well, I like her."

"Who could've guessed," Fazil says. "We were going to go out to pick up the rest of the supplies we'll need; want us to grab anything for you?"

"You'll probably get a way better price on rations than me. I'm not picky and I'll pay you back. Or in advance, if you like."

"If you eat the same things as humans you can pay us back later."

"I've gotten used to surface food at this point, yeah."

"All right. We'll catch you this evening, then."

"Here?"

"Yes."

"See you then."

"See you then!"

They head out.

Elsewhere in the tavern, the arm wrestling match has devolved into a drunken argument and someone is reading tarot cards and someone is counting out an astonishing sum of money and some people are passing around a magic item that makes you levitate six inches off the ground and bob up and down.

Any chance of a go at the crystal ball?

For two hundred gold, sure.

"Highway robbery, you've been passing it around so much a kitten'd throw it off half the time by now."

One hundred.

"For two tries in a row I'll give you eighty."

Deal.

She pays up and she looks. Twice.

Doesn't work.

She sighs and heads out, casting Penumbra before she steps onto the street, and looks for cheap lunch.

Fried fish, baked fish, lamb kabobs, rolls, racist glaring.

She'll take whichever of those comes with the least price discrimination.

And that evening she's hanging around in the tavern again waiting for her party.

They're back. Dressed a little better. Hagan has a large backpack and Mahdi has a bag of holding that's not quite successfully dressed up as a normal coin purse. Hagan and Fazil are armored. They have a flying carpet.

"Ready to head out? We can sleep on the carpet, make some progress towards the pass."

"I'm set. Never ridden a carpet before, is it hard not to fall off in your sleep?"

"Do you fall out of bed?"

"No, but it's a bit lower-stakes, nobody's in it with me, it's not moving through the air, and there's often sheets tucked in."

"We throw some ropes in loops over it to be safe but I've never personally needed them. If you do find yourself falling yelp so Mahdi can featherfall you."

"Supposing he's sleeping very deeply does this qualify as doing something too stupid for my insurance to kick in, the wording's not exhaustive."

"I'll kick up a fuss on your behalf if they drag their feet for some reason. I wouldn't expect them to."

"Thanks."

To the flying carpet. "How are you accustomed to doing watches?"

"Hagan Mahdi me. We'll probably want one of us awake, until we know you a little better."

"That's fair. If it ever comes up I like first or last, my sleep schedule wanders all over the place up here but solid blocks is better."

"Shouldn't be any trouble." He throws her a blanket.

She attempts to sleep on the carpet and manages all right after awhile.

In the morning they're well away from Sothis, though the dome can still be seen on the horizon. Fazil is praying and Mahdi is preparing spells. Hagan is sharpening a hunting knife and watching it recede on the horizon.

Belmarniss puts her goggles in place before opening her eyes and gets underway on her own spell prep.

And eventually they all have spells prepared and there's not much to do except catch her up on the details of the plan (there's another pass, and a dangerous route through the Underdark that reportedly connects them; they're hoping to sneak through it and then trace the missing party's footsteps), and trade adventuring stories. 

"We mostly stick to Osirion. There's a lot of culture shock, travelling internationally - I guess you'd know -"

"Oh yeah. What kinds of things shock you?"

"Everyone cheats each other very casually. I think adventuring is a - less respectable career path, most places, attracts different sorts. And, well, the women."

"We're very shocking. Cheats each other how, even in Osirion people'll tell me a price is a gold with a straight face when they charged the last guy two silver."

"One person will negotiate the commission and then tell the others it's half what they really got. Or they'll agree on quarters and then not pay up. Or break something they want replaced and claim it as an expense. There's a line - at least to me - between price discrimination and lying. But not to everyone, I guess, and that's fine except you have to be on guard all the time and it's exhausting."

"Huh. Suppose if you get used to not-that it'd be real unpleasant. Though those scams only work if everybody's expecting they can get away with not checking."

"It's probably one of those things where there are two workable equilibriums and it's mostly only unpleasant to be in the crossfire where they meet. Like the women, actually."

"I don't think of myself as an equilibrium."

"I mean - there's the kind of society where you don't sleep around and don't countenance it in others and wait for marriage and take marriage very seriously, and it works fine. And there's the kind of society where you do whatever you want but can't expect anyone else to behave better than that, and that works too, after a fashion. But someone trying the wrong strategy in either society will have a pretty bad go of it."

"Funnily enough drow sleep around less than Osirians do, I think - I don't know if I have an accurate picture, of course, but I think that's true whether you count, I think they call it 'lovebirds' here, or whatever the equivalent is for men, or if you leave those out of consideration entirely. But of course that's because it's a rather risky sort of property crime, stealing somebody's man."

"Huh. Adultery's a serious crime here, too, course -"

"Does it get you murdered, by and large?"

"Not generally. If you went after, like, the pharaoh's women, or something, then sure."

"Maybe I'm wrong. Maybe it just makes for more interesting gossip here than down there."

"Sounds pretty plausible to me. People respond to incentives and so on."

"Down there it's just one of a whole lot of reasons somebody might get murdered."

"Women also don't want to sleep around as much as men do. So if the women are in charge I'd expect you wouldn't have as much of it."

"What else do people get murdered for?"

"Pissed off their mom. Got caught screwing someone over for a promotion or with a scam or something. Happened to be attending a dinner party somebody decided to spike with poison. Demon patron doesn't like their face. Demon patron does like their face."

"Gods. Why don't more people leave?"

"Vicious propaganda," Belmarniss says. "Gotta be ready for the inevitable plunge into the Abyss."

"So if you know who to scry on to prove it's not inevitable, you can prove to them there's another option."

"Like I said, all I know for sure is that Pharasma isn't insurmountably racist against infants. People say they've seen drow in Axis, in Heaven, in the Maelstrom, if I ask around. But I don't know who to check who didn't land in the Boneyard as a baby."

"Have you just been trying people you know?"

"I don't have fourth level spells, myself, so I'm not trying very systematically yet. When I get a look in on a crystal ball I don't spend it on that, I don't have any particularly plausible candidates."

"I know that not everyone in Cheliax goes to Hell but Cheliax is new, maybe in a couple hundred years it'll have it refined down enough that they all do and don't even believe they could do otherwise."

"Could be. I suppose if I die I'll find out where I am."

"Man, that'd be - I don't see how she could call herself neutral, if she condemns whole races no matter their actual alignment."

"Who's going to tell her she's anything else?"

"Sounds like you might be on it."

"How'd you guess."

"Most people don't say 'if I die...'"

"Well, you know, I'm an elf. A lot can change in an elf lifetime."

"Hey, I'm not trying to discourage you. It sounds like a great plan."

"I'm glad you think so!"

And they can keep on flying.

Belmarniss spends her spare time scribbling in what is presumably drow language in a notebook.

By midafternoon they haven't encountered anything of interest and Mahdi decides it's safe enough to burn a spell and takes off flying. He carries a paper target; Hagan shoots at it from the carpet. 

When he gets back he's in a notably better mood.

"Could run a scry, if you wanted. For your quest."

"Person I look for lately isn't really informative. Died when he was a baby."

"Some other reason?"

"My twin."

"Well, offer stands, if you want it."

"Yeah. If you don't mind."

"For sure. I don't have a ball, so it'll be an hour."

She nods.

And he attempts to scry for her twin.

She waits. She writes.

Eventually the scry fails.

Sigh. "Sorry. Second one of the day is for the people we're looking for. Yesterday that was completely useless, as it was totally dark, but I should look, in case it's changed..."

"...I mean, it won't stop me, I don't know if it'll stop your goggles but I went to a whole lot of wizard school in the dark and nobody ever said 'don't bother picking up Scry, you can't look at anything you care about that way unless they happen to be cooking right then'."

" - oh. That's - obvious, actually - spells work through the scry sometimes but not often, but if it's just your vision that's probably different -

- all right, let me cook this one up."

"Mm-hm."

And an hour later he has a scry on one of the people they're after. This one works; this is unsurprising, as he has a name and a possession and a picture and the lock of hair that the smuggler deposited with his guild. 

It's dark.

"Looks like they still have food. Guy's yelling at one of the slaves, a human one, I see some halflings too. There's a pretty beat-up looking slave sleeping it off. They've been in one place for a while, I see fruit peels and stuff piled up. Don't see anybody who looks dead or dying."

"That's good. Do we want to try a message -"

"I think so. Tell them their guild hired help, we're looking, where are they -"

Mahdi attempts this. He does not get a reply. "Think it failed. Ah well. We can try again tomorrow."

Belmarniss nods and flops onto her back to watch clouds go by through her goggles.

And night comes, and they sleep, and keep watch.

She lets her sleep schedule wander, drifts nearly nocturnal. During their copious downtime one morning after she's put her spellbook away and chewed through a breakfast ration she says, "I told you all about my babymurdering matriarchy and my dead twin and stuff, do I get your life stories or should I just figure you're all Ali M. Randomosirian?"

"Not much of a story really. My family grew up in a very difficult position and then I was chosen by Abadar and my life got much better and once my siblings were grown up I decided to be an adventurer until I get a sign it's time to stop. Mahdi was smart and his parents had some money so he went to wizard school. Hagan - what's it going to be this week -"

"Ten thousand years ago, a random courtier was turned to stone to guard the tomb of a rich man. Much later, some adventurers wandered by and one of them said 'Dispel Magic' and I found myself alive."

"We met about six years ago. It's not a big adventuring scene, you get to know most people, and most of them were awfully reckless, or awfully lawless, or not going for good -"

"I'm not going for Good," Mahdi says. 

"And I'm awfully lawless."

"They'll tell you that but whenever I'm like 'hey let's rescue some slaves for under-market compensation since the slaves were meant as part of it, and then turn their captors over to the authorities', both of them go 'when do we leave'."

"Alignments just aren't very interesting," opines Belmarniss. "They're important, sure, but they aren't interesting, 'where are you going' is interesting but 'what alignment are you' is almost solely worth asking as a proxy for that question."

"There's definitely a lot of noise. But - I don't know, I find that lots of people are better once they decide to start aiming for Good."

"It's like asking 'what's for dinner' and getting 'I remembered the salt and didn't poison it', which is usually better than the alternative, sure, but doesn't distinguish between meat and potatoes and could easily taste repulsive and might still kill you if you're allergic."

Snort. "All right, where are you going?"

"A temple with a very charming insurance salesman."

He puzzles that one over for a bit. "Don't get it. You've already got death insurance - do they sell insurance for, dunno, attempting lichdom -"

"Starstone," says Mahdi. "It's pretty much just paying up front for the resurrection, though."

"I considered lichdom! I'd probably only have to kill a couple of babies and they could be ones with terrible parents. But Mahdi guessed it."

"Huh. Are you going to try to put Pharasma out of a job?"

"Well, she isn't qualified."

"And by many reports doesn't even like the work!"

"She could let Nirvana have their way and retire if she hates it!"

"I assume she complicatedly can't, somehow, but maybe it's a somehow there's some way to change."

"Yeah, I'm looking into that. It's a whole research project."

"Well, good luck."

"'preciate it."

They reach the mountains. The tunnel is where it's expected; they make their way in.

The ground's not very smooth. She casts an obscure cantrip before dicey sections.

"What's that?"

"Keeps me from tripping. I can fly and shoot and so on fine but I have the worst time with tripping, this thing probably saved my life. Not because I would have fallen off a cliff, mind, but my mother was presumably weighing 'precocious at magic' against 'embarrassingly klutzy' and if there hadn't been a direct way to compensate -" She draws her finger over her throat. "Then again maybe I'd've been fine, she was a softie as they go."

"People'd kill their kid for being clumsy?"

"...look, if you're expected to kill at least half of them, a lot of things start looking like great excuses."

"I guess. 

What happened to her -"

"Got awfully mopey when my dad died. Had a fight with her mom and her aunt both about getting a new one. Not sure which of them killed her."

"Man.

'm glad you got out."

"Mm-hm."

There are bats, and giant scorpions, and rock slimes, further in. 

She shoots at these with her crossbow or the occasional zap of crackly black force or frost as the situation seems to warrant, though some of the bats are harmless.

Hagan seems very pleased to know which bats are harmless and is fairly meticulous about not killing them, going forwards.

"And those ones are good eating. ...for me, I don't know if you'd like them."

"Do drow slaves mostly eat the same things as drow? - or can they do so safely, I guess there's probably fanciness stuff."

"They don't get bat because we don't farm bat, we hunt it wild. They eat the same farm products."

"I think I'll try it." 

Fazil sighs.

"There isn't a lot of meat on one. Good in soup broth with mushrooms and root veggies though."

"Well we have some of that packed. Stretching our food supply is responsible," he adds to Fazil. "Gonna have to feed all those people on the way out."

"I didn't object," he says. "I'm also not going to approve because if you get sick I don't want you saying it was my idea."

He shoots some bats. 

"Alright, is there a trick here -"

"Well, you don't want to just eat it whole, but I think you skin it and debone it like anything else. You want me to show you?"

"- yeah. Thanks."

She has a knife. She takes apart a bat.

He watches, and then takes apart the remaining bats. And they can have bat stew, though he will only have a little because you never know if it'll turn out deadly to humans or something.

She will take any stew he doesn't want. Om nom. It tastes sort of like alligator crossed with rabbit.

Lotta work for the meat but if it turns out to be safe for humans and halflings it'll probably be helpful on their way back out. 

"You want me to take a watch yet or nah?"

They glance at each other. 

"Go for it," he says. "First?"

"Sure."

He does not 100% sleep during her watch but it's a start.

She sits up, writing in her notebook, and wakes up the next shift after a few hours.

And when they're all rested and bespelled they can keep going.

They encounter a rock troll, and some giant spiders, and some long-dead unfortunates who ran into the spiders and didn't fare well and had been smuggling drugs. The drugs have rotted but the bodies have some magic items.

"Anyone need a Hat of Disguise?"

"I could see what I look like in another color palette."

He tosses it to her. "If you want to keep it after the mission it comes out of your share, at the price I can get for it in Sothis, but if you wanna play around with it that's free."

"Legit." She dons the hat. "Not sure if it'll be worth it. Guess it is if I hit a tail-risk type of racist and isn't if I don't."

"I would assume most particularly boorish racists don't actually know drow exist. I'd barely heard of them."

"Maybe they're like that for anyone who isn't human. Or isn't Osirian."

"All right, they very well might be that."

"Hat won't hide my accent, s'pose. Who buys these? Spies? Theater departments?"

"Smugglers, in this case. Maybe the sort of people who end up on Wanted posters."

"Is it particularly lawful to sell it on, then?"

"Their sale isn't illegal in Osirion, I assume because the authorities did whatever calculations they do for each law and it didn't come out in favor of banning them."

"Might just be that they want the list of banned things short, more than they want to ban some things that should maybe be on it. Wands of evil spells and Greater Invisibility, that's it, and no one can say they didn't know that like they could if there were fifty."

"And that settles whether it's lawful for you to sell it even if it'll likely aid and abet things that are in fact illegal?"

"Yes. They would've banned it, if it was inherently lawless to sell under any circumstances they could reasonably get to prevail."

"How do they figure that out, those phylactery things? Asking Abadar?"

"I didn't specialize in policy but I think both of those, yes."

"Do all the alignment-detecting spells go through Pharasma or do they check things more locally, d'you know?"

"I never really thought about it. I know people don't always go to the afterlife they pinged as even quite recently before death, though they overwhelmingly do."

"How much of that is Nirvana yoinking people?"

"Some of that, some slightly surprising outcomes at trial, probably some last-minute behavior which would've changed how they pinged."

"I wonder what the trials are like."

"Must be fascinating. I don't know if they're unscryable or just difficult to determine the timing of well enough to look in on them."

"Not a church project? I guess it's not germane to policy so much."

"I am sure if a scry ever stumbled on one there'd be lots of notes taken but I don't think it's a current priority. I think it'd be good for our moral authority to have a lot of knowledge about the system generally but the priority is definitely the policy side."

"Well, you still have better backed assertions than most people."

"Thank you."

She spots an ooze; she points it out.

Ooze can die. They venture deeper. They scry on their targets.

"Looks like they're in the same place. The beat-up slave looks pretty out of it, if we don't find them sharpish I wouldn't bet he'd be alive even if they don't resort to cannibalism. I think they're rationing, there's an argument going on looks to be about a hunk of salt beef. How long were they heading deeper in?"

"Four days. We should be faster, though. - I can use Nap Stack tonight, lets us only sleep two hours."

"Do you need me to chip in for the pillow?"

"Nah, I'd be casting it just the same if you weren't here."

She nods. They nap.

And then they can pick up the pace.

"How'd you pick up this job?" Belmarniss wonders, routing around a stalagmite.

"A fellow from their guild was in the tavern the morning of the day we met you, pitching it. The price wasn't great and he was being vague. I left and asked Hagan to check it out - I look like I might report you for lawbreaking, right -"

"He was a bit more forthcoming with me. Wouldn't say what the cargo was, but he said it'd sell for about three thousand and we could count that towards the reward and we had better unload it in Katapesh and it'd be no good if we didn't find them inside the week. I'm not a wizard but I'm not an idiot."

"I suppose it would be a little burdensome to the average law-abiding citizen if a lot of obscure produce were illegal."

"I figured it had to be fancy cupcakes. Fancy cupcakes are all the rage in Katapesh but unpopular in Osirion, you see, and there's a spell to slow them going stale but it won't last forever."

"Plus probably their pretty frosting flowers collapse."

"The cruel pharaoh, cracking down on the cupcake trade with such aggressive measures."

"It's the full-sized-cake lobbyists, probably."

"Seems a bit funny, somehow, blockading the passes out of moral concerns for the slaves while of course this'll get some killed."

"Searching the tunnels is nearly impossible."

"We're doing it."

"Hagan's doing it. And not for people who're trying not to be found."

"I'm mapping as we go, it'll be easy on the way out."

"There you go, the government just needs to employ drow."

"I guess it'd be good for her lawfulness," he says doubtfully.

"You think so? I'm not sure being employed by the government would be good for my lawfulness. I suppose at the granularity that matters I can't get any worse."

"Why would being employed by the government be bad for your lawfulness."

"Oh, suppose they told me to do something and I didn't want to do it? That would just be awful. They're so much less likely to tell me to do things if they aren't trying to pay me to do them."

Snort.

They catch up to the slavers that evening. Raised voices can be heard from a good distance away.

"I hope they're glad to see us," she remarks. "For certain values of 'see' - what does dark look like to you -"

"What do you see when you close your eyes?"

"The inside of my eyelids. Blood vessels and stuff."

"Huh. Have you had the spell Blindness cast on you?"

"The shorter term version. Also I can't see for a bit if I step into the sunshine without taking precautions. But it looks like light."

" - huh! Well then I haven't the slightest idea how to describe it. It ...looks like everything is a black thing of a uniform shade and distance and texture, I guess."

"Like if you dropped a black blanket over your face?"

"Sure, yeah. A very thick one."

"Huh!"

He listens to the yelling for another second. "All right, let's go say hello."

"Mm-hm." Onward towards the slave caravan.

The slavers are in fact happy to see them, or at least relieved; they do a lot of complaining about their guild having agreed to forfeit their goods but grudgingly admit they are entirely lost and need an escort out.

Belmarniss goes looking for the slave who was having a bad time of it and anybody else she should draw Fazil's attention to.

The slave isn't yet dead; another has been mauled by a giant scorpion; the rest are mostly just hungry and dehydrated.

"Fazil, found some patients for you. And their water barrel's over here."

"Cure Light Wounds. Cure Light Wounds. Create Water. - Hagan, I don't think the slaves speak Taldane -"

Hagan switches to Kelish and says something to them which seems to greatly irritate the slavers.

"Comprehend Languages -"

"And everyone should please eat something, it's at least four days of travel to get out of here. We'll eat the assholes who brought you here if we have to but they don't look that tasty."

Snicker.

He grins at her. Answers some questions. "We're from Osirion. Their guild advertises.

Yeah, Osirion has slavery, but only for people who did something wrong, can't get born or kidnapped into it.

I have no idea what's gonna happen to them  Yall will probably get a really pathetic amount of reimbursement and be shooed off to seek your fortunes. 

Haven't heard anything about anyone else. I'm sorry."

"Anyone else? They get split up from some folks?"

"When we were sold to these people."

"Yeah. Haven't heard anything." Sigh.

"We should get moving."

"You all out of food or you need to pack?" Belmarniss asks.

There is not that much food left. There's a couple handfuls of the fruit they were hidden under, starting to go bad, and there's a suspect corpse of a scorpion-thing.

She hands out fruit to the hungrier-looking slaves so it can be useful before it rots.

One of the slavers objects to this. "We were saving that."

"We get the contents of your caravan as part of our loot, we can do what we want with it. You want to get drunk on rotten fruit, do it once we're out."

He makes a vulgar gesture he clearly does not expect to be visible in the dark and turns to go where they are being herded.

Herd herd herd. Anybody having issues with the terrain can get a casting of Root, though it doesn't last too long.

"Well," he says cheerfully, switching back to Osirian, "off to a good start."

"Don't say that where fate can hear you."

They start to make their way back out. No one else seems to have automatic instincts for everywhere they've been before, for some reason.

It's not an instinct, she's been writing it down. "Bat stew agree with you okay?" she asks Hagan.

"I seem in perfect health."

She shoots down some more bats the next time they stop for a break near a flock of them. Hands Hagan a few and sets to butchering.

He can do that too. Everyone will maybe not have their choice of food on the way out but they shouldn't actually starve.

Belmarniss eats a lot of bat and gives away most of her ration biscuits.

"Don't like them? Or are you protecting the rest of us from any effects too much bat might have on abovegrounders."

"I like bat and if anybody finds they don't and pukes that's a waste. Rather not carry the faint-looking halfling the rest of the way."

"Is someone faint-looking? I don't think my darkvision measures up to yours."

"The littlest one with the patch in her dress."

Nod.

When the stew has all one way or another been eaten they can keep backtracking to the exit.

And slowly, with some monsters but no real mishaps, they make their way out of the cave system. They emerge midmorning, four days later, slime- and dirt- and grime-coated, mostly grateful for the fresh air and the sun.

Well, some of them know Prestidigitation and are quite tidy, and not at all grateful for the sun, but oh well.

"Getting everyone back is going to be a real pain. Too many to fit them on the carpet."

"I guess we take the roads. You know, I could've made almost this compensation sitting at home scrying."

"You hate scrying."

"Someone should maybe nip out with the carpet and back to pick up food while the rest of us walk."

"I'll do that," says Mahdi.

"How long is it hiking? With halflings, they're slower."

"A couple of weeks at minimum. Maybe we can contact the authorities in Sothis and get them to bring everyone in a bit faster."

She nods. "You might be able to fit all the halflings on the carpet with you?"

"A bit of a tight fit. I guess that's probably better than weeks of walking in the desert."

"And it'll mean you don't have to haul back as much food."

"All right."

"You're going to get on the carpet and go with Mahdi back to Sothis," he tells them. 

Terrified and variously frail halflings start complying with this.

She dumps the last of her crackers on the little one, double-checks the water supply on the carpet.

He can carry lots of water in the bag of holding. 

Off you go, halflings. On down the road, humans.

"Good working with you."

"Is that my cue to go in a different direction or something, I thought I was coming back to Sothis."

"Oh, sorry, you're entirely welcome to. I just imagined maybe there is a faster Underdark-tunnel way to get there or something, and marching through the desert sucks, and you've earned your share, they're out and all alive."

"There might well be a tunnel but I don't know of one, since it's not like the Underdark has a consistent tunnel pattern throughout, and the one that these guys could tell me about got sealed! And if I go a level down and ask for directions they might, you know, kill me."

"They seem very eager to do that. Well, welcome to marching through the desert. Sometimes there are sandworms."

"Exciting. Are they good eating or just good target practice?"

"They are regrettably not edible at all."

"Oh well." Tromp tromp.

It is hot and dry and windy. Fazil can supply them with practically arbitrary water, and Hagan and Fazil can cast Endure Elements on some of the worst-off people, but it kind of sucks.

"I really think having a huge fireball suspended in the sky half of every day is more trouble than it's worth," Belmarniss comments.

"You know, when you say it like that it's hard to argue."

"I like colors. Colors are great. You can get colors off reasonable amounts of light, this is just excessive."

"Maybe someday it can be on the list of things you take up with the creators."

"Pretty far down the list."

"On optimistic days I imagine all new Good gods get a book that reads 'welcome aboard, here is our grand plan to fix everything and here is why it has to take thousands of years'."

"See, that would be a pretty encouraging discovery."

"It'd have to be a very impressive book."

"Oh yeah."