"What, pretending to be other people? Trying to fence stolen goods? Probing for weaknesses?"

"All of the above. So much - lying for no reason."

"There are reasons! Decoy royalty are a thing upstairs too, I've heard of it in surfacer stories although I couldn't tell you who actually does it."

"Probably countries that put low-level casters in charge."

"Oh, no, she could easily be way scarier than that. I was being polite. Ultimately manners are about making people more comfortable, and nothing makes somebody comfortable like knowing you're friendly enough to point out their mistakes unexploited and foolish enough to only identify the decoy mistakes."

"- huh."

"She could also not be very scary. Basically we have no information we didn't have before about that. Also I worry I'm making it sound like there was only one way to play that but it's not a choreographed dance, it's just a whole different set of background assumptions. She could have said Her Darkness was a powerful cleric and I could have said I appreciated that they weren't insisting on the spell resistance thing, and that would've been fine. She could have said that and I could have said, oh, what would Sovi have said, Sovi would have said 'then I bet she knows all about dealing with people more powerful than herself to get shiny things, and lucky me, I have shiny things'."

"- well, I don't think I could do it but luckily I can't do it for unrelated reasons. It's very impressive when you do."

"It's kind of fun but I do like being able to ever stop."

"I guess I can see how people here'd feel like they'd have to own someone to let down their guard around them."

"Not necessarily but it sure helps. I think most people who aren't specifically targets have a few close relationships where they figure 'if this person wants me dead I guess that's how I die'. I think I got there with Sovi. I mostly trusted my mom - I didn't know if she'd cave to pressure but I knew it wouldn't be about an offhand remark over dinner.

Oh, uh, I'm not sure if you caught this but it's also possible that in fact was the princess, if she was really curious and higher level than implied. The things I'm pretty sure are correlated with reality are that if it was a body double then it was a junior cleric - though possibly also a relative - and that the person we were talking to but not necessarily the princess if it wasn't her has been to Noctimar but not Zalun."

"I definitely did not catch that and am still unclear on how you knew it."

"Well, what do we know for nearly certain? A princess exists somewhere. I couldn't identify her if I met her, so swapping her out is easy if that's a thing she ever does, which she probably does. I'm cocky but signaling non-hostility, as opposed to being suspiciously obsequious or angry. So a weak princess probably swaps, because you don't want a predictable attitude of any kind to get you an audience with somebody who'll go down to a magic missile; but a strong princess might think it was interesting enough to put on her own crown and meet me. But she gains nothing from me knowing for sure. So if she wasn't the princess she didn't drop the sign anyway, and if she was she didn't drop the pretense anyway."

"Is not wanting people to hear you talk a common thing, or was that just her?"

"Shazeun power distance thing. We don't do it in Noctimar, so I'd be speculating."

Eyeroll. "Royalty everywhere converge on ways to suck."

"It's less inconvenient than the kneeling thing, if you ask me."

"I guess if everyone knows the signed language and they don't miss any - tone, nuance, that stuff."

"Yup. In Noctimar they do bowing - you don't get down on the floor, but you do take your eyes off the royal, which can be scary. I never met one, though."

"Did your city's ruler have a particularly bad reputation or was she elaborately saying something entirely different when she said that?"

"Oh, Zalun's current rajah specifically doesn't like Shazeunt folks because one killed her favorite daughter-in-law."

"I guess that'd do it."

"It probably had very little to do with any national features of Shazeun."

"I figured. But that's par for the course, really, for royalty, hardly a drow thing."

"Does Osirion have any dead-in-law-based feuds?"