"Optionally via prayer."

"If you wanna let me know you made it by giving me healing powers this is fine with me."

"Maybe I will."

Fazil twitches. Hagan goes silent.

"How sure are you they don't speak Elven?"

"They don't, it came up once when we were in Qadira. I will only get a talking-to about not being stupid around girls."

"I'm pretty sure they'd wake up if we attempted to fornicate."

"The, uh, threat model here is that one falls in love and then becomes convinced this replaces all other desirable features of a relationship such as legal protection or common life goals or dispute resolution strategies or a plan to provide for children."

"I suppose that wouldn't wake them up. Still."

"Yeah. I dunno if it's right. It's - closer than the thing I started with."

"That being 'lots of choices for Abadar'? Mm. I think I've been over how not going to get married I am, embarrassing period of my nineties notwithstanding."

"It seems like a very hard thing to do right and everyone who's even trying is compromising on different things but the thing Fazil is compromising is 'not being really uptight all the time' which sure beats compromising on 'basically slavery' or 'dead babies' or 'holding everyone willing to sleep with you in contempt for their willingness to do that' or 'make sure all the work happens behind the curtain so I only see pretty teenagers who are hoping I'll like them' -"

"Yeah. I was a very frustrated ninety-six-year-old by the time I figured it was close enough to impossible to resolve satisfactorily and I don't expect everybody to also settle on being single forever about it."

"Surely with the whole world there's got to be somewhere that's got the right sort of men?"

"So I have this problem where I fully acknowledge that the way my society is about marriage is super fucked up and it should not be that way and any guy would be justified in finding the entire mess a huge repellent dealbreaker and not wanting anything to do with any woman who thought that way about men and also I did in fact grow up there and would feel really weird and dissatisfied and pathetic if I got hitched to some guy who wasn't in so doing planning to regard himself as belonging to me? - I realize that probably sounds kinda horrible."

"I don't think so? I mean, depending what you mean by that it might be something I couldn't advise any guy to get himself into but, like, Mahdi had a nice healthy middle-class Osirian upbringing and wants a wife who'll swear to obey him and then do that, and I don't think that makes him horrible, though if we had to flee to the Underdark for some reason he'd sure have a time finding it."

"It's possible enough time aboveground'll resocialize me. But like if I'd just found some guy who was like, sure, yeah, marital ownership, that's how it works, that wouldn't work either! Because it's not okay in the general case and I'm not really into people thinking it is! It'd have to be somebody who knew slavery was bad and just happened to want to make an exception for the one case because I'm so great or something! And I would also have to do all the normal compatibility filtering stuff!"

"That does sound - uh, maybe not totally insurmountable but like the project of a century that could be better spent. I'm sorry."

"Yeah, exactly. Thanks."

"I would just need to find someone who wanted to settle down in the Dome and have no rights for the rest of their life -  despite, yeah, being correct about what kind of place it is and therefore hating it - and for my brother to get around to having children so mine aren't at much risk -"

"Is this a project of yours, should I be brainstorming what demographics to check -"

"It's not, not really. Uh, the getting my brother to have kids thing would be a worthy project, if drow happen to have a solution to that problem or something. But the rest - nah."

"Far as I know we do not have a spell for that."

Sigh. "Ah well. You'd think someone somewhere would've invented one. Mostly I figure if I make Elysium I can find someone there without nearly so many complications to walk. I guess probably once you are a god you might have satisfactory devotees, too."

"I'm not sure I'll be thronged with people who wanna live in the Dome etcetera. Maybe I'll wind up facilitating slave escapes and some of those will have a taste for purposeless luxury or something?"