"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."

"I regret this change of subject."

"I think once you have anybody buying your grain or whatever you should point out the price'll go up if shipments get stolen. Even if they like being chaotic evil nobody wants to maximize that at the expense of their own convenience in every aspect of their life, you could wind up with drow preventing each other from stealing shit so they can keep buying at nice predictable prices."

"That makes sense."

"They do have police down there, even, not that effective but they exist. Or, they do in Noctimar, I guess some places may do without."

"What kind of laws do you have?"

"Lotta rules for the slaves - that's most of it - but also you're not allowed to murder random people, just your dependents, within the space of a town, and they won't care much about stolen stuff unless it's a slow day but they'll bother about stolen - or 'borrowed' - men or slaves. There's treason laws, can't tote down a paladin and give them a shot at your neighbors in exchange for immunity or anything like that. No poisoning the water."

"Do the men need chaperones?"

"Not the same way people here do? It's not a matter of protecting their reputations, it's a matter of not getting their moms or wives angry. If a guy's mom or wife will take his word for it he wasn't sleeping around and he doesn't think anybody wants to fuck with her through him, he's fine to do whatever, so it depends on the family."

Nod.