"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?"

"It is a valid project and an earnest country attempting it."

"And yet I am glad to be out of there as fast as possible."

"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.