"Oh, abolishing evil afterlives is priority one."

"Cool."

"I think so too, thanks."

"How do you decide when you're ready to try for the Starstone?"

"I'm not sure yet. I don't think it's now and I'm stalling, but I don't have a milestone in mind. Suggestions?"

"What level was Iomedae, do we know?"

"Pretty sure we don't. Not much advantage to advertising it, once you're up there, and a paladin's not like a wizard or cleric where it's pretty easy to say whether anyone saw them cast a ninth level spell or not."

"There's any reason to hurry but I'm really not coming up on death by old age any time soon and - I don't know if I should put any weight on this but my intuition is that I might have to do it the first time. I've scheduled seriously re-examining that for ninth in wizard."

"No one's ever made it on a second try. Small sample, though."

"It's a very small sample but seems like the sort of thing that might have fate bullshit going on."

"It seems plausible that there's something more than lots of magic challenges guarding the Starstone and it might care about whether you've been there before. Or that it's intelligent and adapts..."

"Something like that, yeah, or it's not actually a sure thing by itself and it relies on some level or other on the consent of existing deities - the people who fail don't remember it, right, so maybe they did touch it, and just didn't pass some other filter -"

"Yeah. Hard to imagine what filter, exactly, but the internal politics of the gods don't make sense to me."

"I'll explain 'em to you when I'm a god if you want. Unless there is some important god reason I can't."

"I'll look forward to it."

"Ship," he says tersely about half an hour later, and puts up an illusion to hide them.

"What's the plan?"

"Land invisible, poke around, meet back at the carpet to talk about whether we can and want to start a fight?"

"On the carpet, or flying?"

"I can pull it level with the boat, burns a lot of options to give us all invisibility and flight now."

"Anything else to discuss before we have to hush up - do you have, like, numbers of times you pat each other on the knees to mean stuff -"

"We have a signed language you can do into the palm of someone's hand -" he takes Hagan's and demonstrates - "danger, still, leave immediately, cast buffs, attacking in ten seconds.

Uh. If you're comfortable with that. If not we can do a tap on the shoulder means retreat somewhere we can whisper -"

"Despite the world-renowned ability of drow to get pregnant via handholding I am currently fertility-off so that's fine with me if it's fine with you."

Sigh. "Great."

"Invisibility," says Mahdi, tapping her. "You get eight minutes, fifty-five seconds."