"That was not a funny story."

"Ironic. That's like funny."

"I suppose."

"For the first year of our acquaintance I thought he might be a woman in disguise, because the theme kept cropping up."

"I had a beard."

"Eating the glands of goblins will do that. The poor man's Alter Self."

"How do you know that?"

"I researched what the underground market in them was for so I'd know how bad to feel about selling the ones we needed to dispose of. Eunuchs use them, and men with low energy, and women but it makes them less feminine and grows them hair."

" - well, the more you know. Lotsa Osirian stories about being - objects, not subjects - are about women. Not much of a mystery there."

"There a reason there's a theme of people as objects in your stories?"

Shrug. 

"Ours're the other way around, obviously, all, 'this princess slaughtered her neighbors over the course of hours of epic and captured their comeliest nobly born boy and married him' or whatever."

"Is Osirion as disconcerting as I find that."

"It's maybe eighty-five percent that disconcerting."

"Huh, why's that?"

"You don't outright buy the women and are mostly not keeping people in line under threat of death and you have vaguely sympathetic justifications."

"Awww. Good for us."

They're at Saint Hadassah's.

She hops off the carpet and goes in with her eggs.

And she can trade her eggs for a name.

"Requests for tomorrow if I come back?"

"...pomegranate."

"Ooh, a toughie, I'll see what I can do."

Snort. "Sure. Have fun out there."

She leaves and gives her companions the name.

"Thanks."