He looks off into the darkness where the ship is sailing. "Maybe my brother talked Abadar into a war with Cheliax somehow, that'd be something."

"Something is definitely what it'd be. There should be a Malediction for Nirvana."

Snort. "That'd be neat."

"The Nirvanans would be so happy!"

"I wonder why there's not! I guess messing with peoples' afterlives is Evil, maybe even if you're messing with them in an advantageous direction?"

"Have I mentioned I hate Pharasma? I hate her."

"I was told, though I don't know if it's true, there weren't afterlives at all before her, and all the souls just dissolved back into energy or whatever."

"Maybe someone would have done better than this if she hadn't decided to fuck up at it!"

"I guess maybe they would've."

"Like, if a place has... a ton of wildfires, and you're a god, you could make it rain really hard everywhere all the time and that'll sure solve it. Warp the landscape, flood the cities, and still doesn't save everybody from fire if their stove inside their house falls over, but sure, it addresses the wildfire issue! But now somebody will have a hell of a time doing something less stupid because you've warped the landscape and flooded the cities!"

"I agree! Though I guess I imagine it's easier to fix most people being around in bad places than not around anywhere."

"This system doesn't even actually solve that! If I don't find a good place to put my parents in a reasonably timely fashion they will be gone!"

"I'm sorry."

"Thanks. Ugh. I'm getting maudlin and it is not my regularly scheduled maudlin afternoon."

"Want a funny story?"

"I was about to ask, yeah."

"Once upon a time when I was ten I was dragged to a fancy dinner and hated it and got the idea that maybe an illusion of me would be good enough so I asked my brother to spin one up, only he does his spells by singing, so he had to sing all dinner to keep it up, but he told everyone he had a new song in his head and if he stopped before he'd sung it out loud he'd lose it, and it worked fine, except that my mother told me after dinner I'd been rude to him, pointedly ignoring the song all meal."

"Well now I can't tell if your funny stories are true or not - didn't he have trouble eating any dinner, while he sang -"

"Probably. He's not a very practical person. I'm sure Abadar'd pick him over me but he wouldn't be happy about it."

"Is there an obvious next?"

"One younger than me's a cleric in his own right. I don't think he wants to be the pharaoh at all but he'd probably do it fine, just with less - people stuff."

"Is it - known, to the people who it might happen to, exactly what becoming pharaoh entails - I wasn't giving random residents of Sothis much credit for knowing what they were talking about when they argued about whether he basically turns into a fork of Abadar with a limited human capacity or if he's actually just another cleric invested with a lot of pomp and circumstance or somewhere in between -"

"Not - exactly? It's hard because they also get the crown at the same time and the crown is - you know the most powerful items you can get for Cunning, it does that and Wisdom and Splendor and then there's the added responsibility. I think it might just be all that and then having Abadar as a close confidant you talk to for hours. But when we were kids we got the official theological account - which if you haven't heard it is that gods have aspects, which are facets of their personality and aptitudes that are themselves coherent and identity-like in the way a person might be, and for ascended gods the person they were before ascension is one of their aspects but it's more complicated for the ones that were never human, and each pharaoh becomes an aspect of Abadar, and nothing on what that's like."

"I assume he doesn't let people try on his hat."

"Didn't ask. Didn't want - every time I talk to him I'm scared he'll tell me he's arranged me a marriage and I can't sneak away."