"I don't have that ability! It's a seventh level spell! I don't even know where he heard of it!"

"When I was in disguise as a body double of the princess of Iblydos -"

"Silence."

He writes, with very neat handwriting on a piece of paper he shows Belmarniss,

That was fun. 

She laughs. Silently.

"That was going to be a good one," he complains when the spell wears off.

"They usually are, or I'd have stopped asking you personal questions a long time ago."

She makes an encouraging gesture. "Well, you were in disguise as the body double of the princess of Iblydos, go on."

"Her father had arranged the body doubles being disguised high level Osirian adventurers because they kept dying and no one wanted the job. But we'd all take it if he'd cover the insurance, and most of the assassination attempts were distinctly nonlethal to high level adventurers anyway. - unbeknownst to her father the princess had a secret lover and unbeknownst to the body doubles he liked to pop in and surprise her. Took a while to figure out that he wasn't an assassin and then a while after that to communicate that he had the wrong person but I'm not complaining."

Giggle.

"How did you even get to Iblydos."

"Freak...hurricane tornado."

"A tunneling hurricane tornado?"

"Distracted by the hurricaning and tornado I didn't notice whether it was tunneling."

"I guess that's fair. How'd you get home again?"

"The king turned me into a frog when I was done with the job, to avoid paying me, so I was forced to hitchhike with a trading caravan of halflings and then get myself turned back in Absalom."

"What's it like to be a frog?"

"Excellent. No debts, no obligations, no complicated geopolitics, you can lick your eyeballs..."

"You often want to lick your eyeballs?"

"It's very soothing."

Giggle.

"If you encourage him he'll never stop."

"Oh, sorry, were we going to have very serious important conversations on this carpet trip. How goes progress on your theology paper about trade relations with the drow."

"I did look up existing writing on related concepts, actually. Uh, in particular, there was a paper in last month's Prices telling the story of a series of agreements between a corrupt and slightly fraudulent businessman and one bank that continued working with him after he'd defrauded them in the past and defrauded lots of other banks and generally established himself to be a terrible credit risk. They charged him exorbitant fees for the privilege, and he didn't steal their money."

" - is the relevance just that we could charge drow higher fees for being chaotic and evil?"

"A bit broader than that, right, it's that - a lot of people have the intuition that if people are bad then you shouldn't trade with them, especially not if they're bad at being trade partners, but you still should, just at a different price, and sometimes you'll get very rich doing that."