"The horror." She wobbles and sits down suddenly.

He reaches out to help and then withdraws his hand apologetically. " - sorry. Just, looked like you might fall."

"I'm not the one with this custom where you have to let people tumble off their flying carpets rather than touch their hands, dude. It's okay. I wouldn't've tried that without my snazzy anklet. Or come along on a boats adventure at all. But I coulda gotten a Fly off before hitting the water."

"You don't have to let people fall off your flying carpet, you just have to - be clear that you were preventing them from falling off their flying carpets." Sigh. "And I don't. I can do whatever I want. More choices for Abadar."

"Scattering bastards around - ex hypothesi half-human ones! - that's allowed? That's not very Osirian."

"Oh, no, that'd be no good, they'd have to round them up and take them to the Dome for a decent political education. But it's not - very Osirian. I didn't encounter the concept that - human women need marriage and stability, that it's no good for anyone to just shuffle in an endless supply of pretty girls whose problems someone else is taking care of, that you're wronging them - until I met them." Headjerk at his sleeping friends.

"The girls themselves didn't - oh can't contradict you etcetera, right."

"I know the place you're from is worse but - I really hated it."

"I'm not super into comparing places like that. Also like I ever noticed it sucked while I still lived there, it wasn't - hiding."

He stares off at the horizon, where the Dome is barely visible, maybe. "Pharaoh wouldn't be doing whatever the hell is being done here without a good reason. But - if I didn't know that I'd stop it, because it looks pretty bad."

"I don't suppose you're planning to, like, visit your folks and ask him."

"I'm scared it'll all be over, once he figures out what I've been doing. I guess it'll be over soon enough anyway. They're gonna retire."

"You don't wanna pick up more party members, keep going...?"

"I do. I probably will. But - I got lucky, here. Most adventurers - most people  - suck. Keep wishing they wouldn't retire, but - they want to. Settle down, have a wife, have some kids..."

"I work with people who suck all the time but I admit I don't love it."

"It's really not the same."

"I also wouldn't love - the feeling that if my mask fell off in the wrong place at the wrong time my friends who didn't up until that point suck would - fold themselves back into a system that does."

"They've got Axis to think about, right, it's - it'd be asking a lot -"

"Oh, yeah, I mean, I wouldn't blame them? I got a look at my brother in the Boneyard and he seems fine but you wouldn't pick it for its own sake - but that wouldn't make it pleasant."

"It doesn't usually feel as close to falling apart as it has lately."

"Yeah.

Uh. Why exactly do you think this highly of your brother - like, the environment doesn't sound like one conducive to super good epistemics and that probably gets even worse in his direct orbit -"

"No one has ever successfully lied to him about anything since he was four. He wasn't confused about how things worked, he knew everyone and took good care of them, he'd pin down any advisor who was flattering with the statistics ...I suspect though I've never asked him that he arranged who I got introduced to so I wouldn't have kids, wouldn't be stuck forever. The slave reforms were him, all carefully cleverly rolled out and everything.

I'm sure he makes mistakes but - too small for anyone to catch, or too big for anyone to ever be sure it was a mistake, nothing in between."

"What do you mean too big -?"

"Like, maybe setting low tariffs on machine parts was a mistake because it deterred some great inventor from developing better techniques and training local workers and Osirian machining would be a decade more advanced if he'd done it. Or maybe he should've abolished the monarchy. Or maybe, I dunno, drow relations are more important than anything he's done."

"He has time to do anything with drow relations but I suppose perhaps you'd have heard - you do ever go home? - if he were working on it."