"We could send someone who can cast truth spells?"

"You might wanna do that for at least the big ticket stuff, yeah."

"It's not that costly to us, Abadar has a specialized version that's first level. And probably we should have the church involved anyway in case any of the drow want to learn about it."

"It will be a tough sell on account of the fact that they are all pretty convinced Pharasma is racist but who knows."

"Huh. Do you mean that literally or do you just mean that they figure they're all lawless and evil -"

"Literally. I ping good, they'd expect me to wind up in the Abyss anyhow."

"Do you want me to ask if that's so -"

"I have been able to determine that it is not true of drow who die as babies but if you manage to confirm a case of a non-baby landing anywhere else I'd love to hear about it."

"Oh, I just figured I'd ask Abadar, I'd expect him to know if something like that were in place. But I will also pass it along if our scrying turns anything up."

"I would also love to hear what Abadar has to say on the matter."

"I expect I'd have been told already if the system we're working so hard on is rigged but it's possible there's something specific going on with drow that didn't obviously impinge on what we're trying. I'll ask."

"Thanks. I can generally be reached via the Onyx when I'm in town."

He writes this down alongside a review of the mushroom ("chewy"). 

"There are many mushroom cultivars, maybe you'll like some. How are you planning to navigate the fact that all the decisionmaking drow are women?"

"It seems like there are sufficient other reasons not to go alone, or are you more thinking they won't negotiate with Osirian men?"

"I think they'll negotiate with Osirian men, although they might laugh at you. I think they will not be amused about laws requiring they be accompanied as though for their own protection in parts of Sothis - specifically after dark adding insult to injury, there, the sunshine is really annoying and takes a lot of getting used to or magic or both. If any of them take up residence here and want to buy insurance to open a business and happen not to be casters or widows then your entire system for indexing the city's occupants will fail gracelessly."

"Ah." He frowns thoughtfully. "We could patch the curfews with something about people possessing darkvision but the laws about insurance you can't just patch, right, you'd have to change them. Hmmmm. - it's not that I like restricting half the population from economic activity, it'd obviously be better not to, it's just that it seems to historically be a package deal with a lot of other things and I'm glad some countries are testing that package but I'm not charmed by its results just yet, they're losing twice as many people as we are. Drow more than that."

"I have a lot of respect for the Osirian project, within its scope. Trading with neighbors who are literally underfoot and therefore may wind up coming and going a lot, or parking here medium to long term, probably does require you to have some way of noting on the books that a drow woman is running her household and she didn't spend a grand on a husband to playact that he was in charge."

Nod. "We'll think about it. Thank you."

"You're welcome. Anything else you wanna know?"

"What else is for sale there? What was most notably for sale when you came here - are the prices there similar to in your home country -"

"Uh, I bought food and a night at an inn and the silk and had not been asked to scope out any other prices so I didn't. The inn I'm not sure how expensive it is compared to Noctimar, I didn't stay in inns in Noctimar. I got ripped off on the silk, I was also purchasing his currency exchange services and he was hedging against the possibility that something was fishy about my coins or something, but I don't think it was otherwise over what I was expecting. The food seemed normally priced to me relative to Noctimar. Do you want to know what struck me when I first came to the surface, or when I came to Osirion in particular?"

"Either!"

"Surface food. Drow aren't going hungry but that's because if a hundred people's worth of farm fails unexpectedly then two hundred people can be dead over that the next morning. And you have us beat on variety by a really long shot no matter how many kinds of mushrooms there are. In Osirion specifically I upgraded my sun-protection gear because here there's enough stupid fireball that even humans don't like it."

He smiles, very slightly. "We're looking into magic items that control the weather permanently but it's hard to predict all the downstream effects. Maybe someday we'll be as cool and cloudy as Varisia."