"Well, afterwards we will need to return with a bolt of silk and exciting news, although if you feel that strongly about it I could sell you to a mushroom farmer."

"Have to be one heck of a mushroom farmer."

"What is it that you look for in your mushroom farmers?"

"Well they had better at minimum have detailed Pharasma-overthrowing plans."

Giggle.

And they can descend into the Underdark.

It's dark. Belmarniss starts mapping immediately, sometimes making a circuit of a cave she can't see clear across to note the number and directions of the entrances. There aren't a bunch of drow right by the aperture, though there are some signs that people have been through - signs of wear on the stone, a couple dropped items of no value.

He puts on his Darkvision and stays out of her way.

She picks directions without explaining herself and is generally pretty taciturn. She doesn't get out of his goggles' range, though.

They go deeper, and loosely southward, without finding much of anything, for a few hours.

He will stay quiet and out of trouble.

They catch bats for dinner and pause for a nap - she hasn't used up any spells, so it doesn't have to be long - in what appears to be an abandoned mushroom farm. She remarks on the layout and the smell; there aren't any objects left to tell by. When they're feeling rested she rearranges their possessions to look nonthreatening - he keeps his bow but she carries the arrows with the understanding that he doesn't have to ask for them if he needs them, just has to look like he would.

They press on through a not-abandoned mushroom farm, which smells much stronger, but don't meet the farmer; she elects not to go say hi, and just picks through rows of basket with fungus peeping out between the wires, careful not to disturb anything, till she finds what might be termed a road. It's smooth and wide on the bottom, all the major protrusions into the path have been hacked off, and it leads gently down, south by southeast, in one direction, and curves a bit west the other way. There is an honest to goodness sign painted on the wall, "Zeun", the capital of Shazeun, and an arrow, pointing in the southerly direction. It's quicker going from there.

They pass a married couple of drow coming up the path. Belmarniss engages the wife in conversation Hagan can't follow even when she gestures at him, makes the lady laugh, ignores the husband, keeps going. There are farms left and right, mostly mushroom, one with pigs which are eating mushrooms, one with a little glimmer of magic light and a not-mushroom smell wafting out of it. They see more and more branching road-tunnels.

And then they hit Zeun.

The city is not all in one cavern, but the highway does dump them in a central honeycomb chamber, ten stories high with ladders and stairs around the edges, and stone layers of marketplace in the center radiating bridges to some of those doors, with the top platform left clear and a trio of drow playing music and singing. Below them on all the other floors of the open stone structure, drow are buying and selling mushrooms, clothes, herbs, tools, weapons, jewelry, miscellany, and people.

Belmarniss motions Hagan a little closer to herself.

Wow. 

He keeps his head down. Steps a little closer.

She circles through the market.

She stops at a stall with a drow man selling fabric and fabric-related sundries and asks him some questions. Laughs a little stiltedly at some presumable joke. Gets some answers. Pulls out some coins, has a conversation about the coins, casts Light on a nearby bobbin to give him a better look at the coins, and manages to exchange them at unfair-to-her rates for some local currency - the drow silver is twice the size of surface coins and she pays triple, and she throws in a few extra surface gold for thinner drow ones, each pressed into a delicate arch after minting. He weighs the coins carefully in his hands as he accepts them, looking at her suspiciously; she makes a dismissive-sounding remark of some sort. He throws in a bolt of silk which the light reveals as slate grey. She hands it to Hagan over her shoulder.

It would be really nice to speak the local language. 

In Osirion - 

- he has some sort of cultural observation here but in his head it keeps coming out silly. In Osirion slaves are different, but, of course they are, he knew that and he's been to places where slaves are differently different. Maybe it's just that enslaving a gender is really weird.

She gets directions from the silk merchant guy and follows them to the edge of the market and up a flight of stairs, into a side tunnel-path where they can find a rock to sit on outside the metal door to some other section of town, perhaps a residence. Not obviously in earshot of anybody; music's barely audible from here.

"You look pensive."

"CIty's very pretty. I guess just because you oppress your men doesn't mean you do the same thing Osirion is doing but flipped."

"We do not! That guy's wife probably just doesn't like working shopfront. Or she's sick or something. It's a wife, not a mom, I've noticed all the obviously married guys around here have their hair over their ears and the ones who obviously aren't have it pulled back behind, I'm not sure if that's a... Shazeun ear modesty... thing or just an arbitrary signal but I'm pretty sure having walked around in there for a bit. Anyway, if you asked him he'd probably tell you he isn't a slave, he's a drow."

"Sure. They don't sell them in markets, they sell them in parlors?"

"There are so many trivial cosmetic differences they can imagine it's not the same thing under the hood. Parlors not markets, they don't do especially low-status work - some women do work shopfront, you don't find drow stirring nightsoil and sand and compost to make farm dirt unless something awful has happened to their family - they usually aren't resold, they get access to their kids by default unless the kids are dead, their wives give a shit about coexisting comfortably with them. Also, like, imagining telling somebody whose general competence as a person gets denominated in gold that if he lived upstairs and was a girl there his family would have to pay somebody to take him off their hands, isn't that the most insulting thing you ever heard."

"Guess so."

"I'd be kinda perversely interested in a study of concrete metrics of marital freedom between drow boys and Osirian girls. How many prospects did they meet, how many got their first choice, like that."

"Ooooh. That sounds interesting. I bet drow men are happier, just because having lots of children with no help is really really rough."

"If you can't afford a milk slave you don't have a kid, or if you fuck up and do have one you kill it immediately, yes. Anyway, it seems pretty chill down here. We can haul the silk up, win my bet, report in, that's really all they paid for, do you think I'll get a tip if I try to find the nearest noble family and pitch them on trade?"

"Probably!"

"See, I don't know why they wouldn't tell me that, I'd have been way more conservative about things without your telling me that and I think they benefit from me knowing. Okay, let's get dinner, you can try the mushrooms, we'll find an inn, should still set a watch in case I look too rich and friendless, and once we're up we can try that."