"Yeah. It's definitely not boring. I like it better than Sothis though it's kind of appalling how many brothels a city accumulates if it's not doing the Osirion thing."

"I didn't count them when I passed through, how many is it?"

"I can't say I counted either but probably a hundred? It's got to be one of the main forms of entertainment."

"Wow. I don't think that will be a major draw, she just likes things busy and exciting, but it won't put her off."

"Busy and exciting she will get. And someday she can spectate when you go for the Starstone."

"Unless Nefreti convinces me not to, I guess." She shakes her head. "I did my attempt at reconstructing the commentary and looked over yours, it helped. It's less substantial than it felt at the time, I think."

"Points towards 'con artist'. And I guess you rarely go wrong telling people to delay going after the Starstone. Though... I dunno. Nethys is supposed to know everything."

"Yeah, well, if his clerics like to pick up extra donations with a scam of this nature they would say that, wouldn't they."

"I guess."

Hug. "I was actually not really expecting the hug but it's very nice."

"You can hardly invite girls into your hotel room at night and then be precious about hugging them."

"I have only a rough model of what you can and cannot be precious about!"

Snort. "I'm glad you got them. I'm sorry the universe is run by Pharasma. I hope your plan to murder her goes great."

"I'm not attached to it being murder. Maybe I will just sentence her to live out a mortal life in some shithole that'll take me a while to get around to fixing, and see how she turns up afterwards."

Nod. Hug.

Eventually she lets go.

"I'll let you know when I'm gonna get Sovi. Though I might end up holding down the group size, if she wants to get a friend out or something and we'd have a capacity issue."

"Yeah, that makes sense. I think Mahdi was planning to work on teleport capacity but I don't know how much there is to gain there."

"For all I know she has a boy she likes and a friend and a favorite slave. It's been a while. She's friendly."

"At some point you don't need a higher caster level for teleport, you need a bigger bag of holding."

"Maybe we should have Fazil on hand at this end in case somebody suffocates in there."

"I'm sure he'd be happy to, but we should try to not need him. I thought I was going to suffocate in a bag once and it was no fun."

"Yeah. I don't even really expect her to want to grab anyone, it just occurred to me, we haven't been in contact."

Nod. 

"G'night."

And she goes off to her own room.

Belmarniss spends the next several weeks assisting her parents with a move into a rental house and acclimation to a) life and limb b) the Material Plane c) the surface and d) Sothis specifically, and, when they don't require her, selling spells in considerable quantity. She has Hagan's money for him by the time her mother says they're ready to have Sovi extracted.

"Ideally we'd scry her first," she tells Mahdi, "I know you're about to groan at me, but I can't even tell you what schedule she's sleeping on, let alone when she'll be unsupervised."

"Yeah, all right," he sighs, and tries to scry her.