"Can you choose to be a cleric? In Osirion lotsa people who dedicate their lives to the church never get a level out of it."

"Demon lords might be different. For one thing nobody keeps dedicating their life to one if a year or two goes by and they've got squat to show for it, they pick a different one."

"Ah. I think people in the church mostly believe that if you're being that conditional about it you don't have the right attitude for it."

"That's probably true, if you're picking your god on that basis. Less so if the whole thing is propped up by the desire to spend slightly less time as a horrible grub later on. That said I'm sure anyone who just deeply feels called to advancing the goals of Orcus can get a level out of him a bit faster."

"What goals are those?"

"He's into undead but he actually isn't very popular with drow as far as I know."

"Do drow slaves mostly go to the Abyss? Do you know?"

"Don't know. I haven't gotten enough crystal ball time to check ones I knew. They're not the ones killing the babies, maybe they get Maelstrom."

"Sure. Is the crystal ball checks just out of personal fascination or are you going to do something with it -"

"Uh, it's kind of to give me a sense of the problem space? I don't want to show up to bother Pharasma without something more substantive than 'how fucking dare you'. I assume she gets that, uh, not all the time, but now and then."

Snort. "Probably."

"So I want to know who's going where and why even though really no matter what I find it boils down to 'how fucking dare she'."

"Fair enough."

"There aren't that many people who could get my dad back. Been a while."

"Have an ear?"

"Fished a bone out of the soup."

"My brother could but it'd be hard to explain why you figured he would. They're okay? The Abyss is dangerous, right -"

"I wouldn't go through you, ideally, I'm imagining maybe I develop enough cachet as a cultural consultant to ask. For both of them and my sister too once there's parents to put her with, if I'm going for broke. I have confirmed that they both continue to exist within the last year, though obviously that could change at any time and it's hard to get a sense of how perilous their immediate conditions are given what there is to look at in the Abyss."

"I'm sorry."

"Lots of people in the Abyss, they're not, like, objectively special. Lots of people in Hell too."

"Yeah. But - it's hard to work, when people you care about are in danger."

"Haven't tried it the other way. Maybe it's amazing."

"Spent a lot of time being really really glad I didn't have kids at home before I figured things out. But at least they'd've been, like, fine, pretty unlikely on the whole to be snacked on..."

"Yeah, lotta things about it would suck but at least not the material comfort now and hereafter part."

"Osirion sucks but they're doing - something it's really reasonable to be doing, you know?"