"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."

"Wouldn't that be nice. Rain's neat the first twelve times. I noticed the thirteenth time it was not neat any more. But I still like clouds."

"Well, if you care to become very rich and donate such an item to us then you can set the weather however you like."

"Can't I also do that if I keep the item to myself?"

"I think we would probably object to random people ongoingly altering our weather of their own accord but I guess if it was popular weather there'd probably not be a lot of motivation to do anything about it."

"It'd improve your rate of drow tourism, if it were cloudy during the day. Oh, uh, are drow going to run afoul of the transporting persons as goods rules if they come up with their sapient possessions? This applies not only to the non-drow slaves but also depending on how liberally you interpret 'as goods' also all male and child drow unless something highly irregular is up."

"The slaves will be a problem. I don't think we're inclined to force an interpretation on drow family structures that they'd probably not think much of themselves? If someone comes up here and murders their kid here they'll get in legal trouble."

"Okay, that de facto makes it impossible for anyone with a baby to move here. Drow just... don't... breastfeed, that's exclusively slave-based. You can encourage them to hire free wetnurses but I don't know how good the uptake will be and anyone who doesn't feel like navigating that and wants to do business here may actually decide to kill their baby rather than mess with hiring a nanny, you should be aware of that."

"Slavery's really a touchy subject here, I can't get different laws for drow without having to renegotiate a lot of other things that we're committed to not revisiting until there's more data in in a few more years. I don't - particularly care about increasing drow infant deaths, should I? Do they make the slaves carry it out?"

"I don't know if they do in Shazeun. You could reasonably not care about increasing drow infant deaths but I did think you should know it would be a consequence of the policy situation."

"I appreciate you making me aware of it, you should keep doing that, I'll mention it to the pharaoh. But I think - a lot of Osirian children die, right, and it's not a particular policy priority because they'll eventually be fine..."

"Yeah, the dead drow babies are also fine, I checked."

"And there's twenty million interest groups on slavery and very little room to maneuver. I hope it doesn't limit too much peoples' prospects of immigrating if they want to."

"It will not stop anybody who really wants to."