Belmarniss shows up early the next morning for her consultancy meeting, munching a pastry from her breakfast spread. "Hey - I was told to meet with a Luay?"
"I think she's really impressive but I don't usually go around saying that since, like, to the conventional mind it'd be somewhat overshadowed by the murdering my twin brother thing."
"Yeah, but if a human does it it's 'that poor girl' and if it's a drow doing it it's 'those awful drow', you know?"
"This of course being a vague gleaning of the aggregate cultural attitudes of surfacers as a group who vary individually and are not best described as 'those racist surfacers', of course."
"In Osirion I mostly hear 'that stupid whore' but one imagines it varies."
"Are you sure? They say it's down to him that we're pretty colors. Throw in enough prophecy shenanigans..."
"Okay, okay, Rovagug technically not racist when murdering everyone he can, arguably racist when he does other things."
"I still feel like that's not exactly racist. If I shoot a fireball into that crowd and by coincidence everyone who dies is a woman I don't know that I'm a sexist mass murderer."
"Hmmm, I suppose."
Speaking of the crowd, it's almost time to go back to pretending that she bought him in Katapesh. "What've you got on you that I can dip into here, it'd be fine if you were carrying all my gold but weird if you were only carrying some of it, I'll give back your change."
Snort. "Good boy." She counts it, writes down the figure, starts shopping around for diamonds.
Rocks really are cheaper down here. The drow still don't love surface gold, even when its color is displayed and she lets them bite pieces, but she makes the case that the Osirians want to start trading with Shazeun and it'll be easier for a dealer in gems and metals to have coins minted to surfacer standards on hand in advance. One of the merchants takes the bait, calls over her sister, and they unlock the double-locked safe they each have one of the keys to, to get out the diamonds and sock away the gold Belmarniss pays for them.
He stays out of trouble and wonders if there's less demand among the drow for resurrections. You'd think there'd be more because of the lack of law enforcement? And because they don't make Axis?
Eventually she has the diamonds bought and paid for and they can leave Shazeun without further ado.
The best kind of mission, really. He asks his question about resurrections once they're out.
"Don't have stats. I think the rocks are cheaper because mining is an incidental to architecture, more than anything about demand."
"He did mention this but not in a way that seemed like it was about me."
They make it out of Zeun without incident, though they spend part of the trip back to the surface alongside a chatty drow woman who asks them if it's true that individuals without levels or huge swords can just go buy surfacer food up there. Belmarniss tells her this is true, though she isn't sure how this individual expects to transport much. She says she's going to load up on spices she can haul herself and then buy some slaves to carry more stuff next time. Belmarniss agrees that this makes business sense and confirms that the slaves will not find being aboveground particularly disabling. She tells her to turn left on exiting the aperture and head for the city - "surfacer cities look like a kid's been playing with blocks, it's stuff stacked up on top of other stuff on the ground".
They're walking faster than the chatty merchant and have lost her by the time they break to the surface themselves and turn left.
There's time left in the day to head to the temple of Nethys if they hurry.