"They mostly do what now?"

"They're not richer than Osirion and they don't have our norms of not having extramarital sex. So they have a lot of infanticide, which you could argue is no big deal really as the baby will get adopted in the Boneyard eventually but it's an Evil act and people get damned for it."

"Wow."

"We will sell you so much birth control," says Isama.

"Haven't invented abortion either?" asks Ana. "Hala says it doesn't even seem to traumatize humans!"

"Either very very expensive or rather dangerous, and still just as evil."

"...why is it evil? If you catch it early, at least?"

"It's not really any different than infanticide! Either way you're sending someone to the Boneyard and whether this is objectively wrong probably depends on what it's like to grow up there but it is the sort of thing the universe predictably holds against you."

"...like, right away after conception you have whatever it is that winds up there? That's - okay for one thing it limits what kindsa birth control we can sell you, some of them just prevent a zygote from implanting, I think, they don't stop it from getting four cells big - what about miscarriages, are people getting tortured over falling down the stairs?"

"No. Most women lose some pregnancies, and that's just bad luck if you didn't try to make it happen deliberately, you don't go to Hell for having a baby catch the pox either. Once there's a soul it winds up in the Boneyard. We could try to pin down when that is more precisely, if it's going to be important."

"It matters if it's any earlier than like a week? I'd need to look it up."

"I have no idea. We might not even have a way to check, I can think of people who lost a pregnancy at eight weeks and we could attempt to scry it but I'm not even sure someone would notice if it was one week."

"Don't humans have that... blood... thing..." says Ana.

"Less often than that," says Ismat. "Pay someone who doesn't want a baby a big heap of gold to try the experiment and she can give some to charity if she turns up evil after? Or would one of the hairpins do it, maybe, I'm not a real wizard and couldn't tell you how they work."

"We can pay someone to try it but she'd need to be a cleric, for us to definitely get a reliable read."

"What share of people go to a bad afterlife?"

"Just under ten percent, in Osirion. More in most places. Nearly all, in somewhere like Cheliax or among orcs or drow or so on."

"There's got to be someone with the levels who doesn't want another."

"Yes, we can put out a request within the church and I'm sure we'll turn someone up."

"Will we be able to arrange a meeting with your me -"

"Probably. I'll be more useful for interfacing with aliens, honestly, foreigners find our customs difficult."

"What about them?"

"You can't approach, or look at, or directly address, the pharaoh without his specific permission, per instance, and you're expected to bow. It is about as annoying as anything else that wastes ten seconds but foreigners tend to take it worse than that."

"Sounds hard on him."

"Well, someday he'll die."

"Is he looking forward to it?"

"Probably."