"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?"

"Itsy bit of one but it's old news by now."

"I don't know this story!"

"No other countries are involved! My father blames his father's second wife for the death of his mother, the first wife, and as an extension of this hates all her descendants, and when I was younger it came to competing intrigues and murder accusations and occasional drawing of swords but they've mostly grown out of it now."

"Huh. That is apart from the plural wives part a drow quality drama, yep."

"I'll tell them you said so. Or I would if I could explain how I met you."

"They don't have their own version of the funny story lever where you could sneak me in somewhere?"

"We don't really acknowledge that I'm usually not there."

"That sounds... awkward."

"A bit. I mostly figure - if they asked then probably at some point they'd get more concerned with stopping me."