"Not just on my account, surely? Hagan is fully conscious!"

"No, no, it's the adventuring and the criminal case in Taldor and the father and admittedly some amount the adventuring companions but not too much."

"I wouldn't want to be doing you any serious reputational wounds. Adventuring's disreputable?"

"Compared to working in the church, which is what most clerics do."

"How'd you settle on this?"

"I worked in the church for ten years. I was blessed at fourteen, I was twenty-four when my younger sister was married. I - didn't feel like it was what I was meant to do with the rest of my life. Abadar didn't directly say anything but gave me a cleric level on my very first adventure, which seemed suggestive."

"Any guesses why?"

"One imagines he thought I could do more good out in the world. I don't know if there was some specific problem he has in mind for me or if all this -" vague gesture. "matters more than it seems day-to-day like it does."

"How about you," Belmarniss asks Hagan, "how'd you start, consider your funny story lever pulled."

"Lived in a village in the desert with my mother and father and twelve siblings. One day they were all eaten by the Tarrasque. I chose it as my first favored enemy."

"Twelve, gosh."

"Right, elves don't have as many."

"Well, not all alive at once, usually."

"Twelve's unusual for humans, too. Not impossible, but unusual with only one wife."

"I had a friend if you can call it that who was third of twenty-three - when I last knew her, might be more by now - and four of them were still alive."

"Gods."

"Very choosy mom. Friend was whip-smart, very charming, and had a bag packed and ready to fuck off to the next country with before her mom got twitchy if she didn't impress all her teachers some year."

"I wasn't very sociable but she made friends with me hoping to convince me to marry her brother. I'm not sure exactly why, she had a lot of answers and most of them weren't funny."

"Looking out for him, maybe?"

"That was probably at least part of it. I didn't wind up actually meeting the guy, I left before she got that far in wearing me down."

"What got you adventuring?"

"Well, I don't want to do the option where I get blackout drunk."

"Do you talk to your family at home, or not so much."

"Not so much."